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Sellouts
the enemy within
repugnants, Neo-liberals, Dinos, and corporate Boot-lickers
march 17, 2019
Sellouts
*Establishment Democrats Are Undermining Medicare for All
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*EXXON, BIG PHARMA, AND WALL STREET LOBBYISTS TO HOST FUNDRAISER FOR MARK KELLY IN WASHINGTON
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Senate Democrats Enabled the Biggest Bank Merger Since the 2008 Crash
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*“Moderate” Democrats Are Really Conservatives — and They Are Dangerous
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Tulsi Gabbard’s Financial Disclosures Leave Out Ties To Koch-Funded Think Tank
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*House Climate Panel Democrats Got Nearly $200,000 in Fossil Fuel Industry Donations
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Five congressional Democrats including Gabbard and Moulton likely to get primaried – From the left
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Joe Biden’s “Bipartisanship” Promotes Republican Agenda
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*A CORPORATE-FRIENDLY DEMOCRAT HAS BEEN STALLING PROGRESS FOR 40 YEARS. NOW A PRIMARY CHALLENGE MIGHT TAKE HIM OUT.(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Kirsten Gillibrand is looking toward the future. Is she ready to face her past?
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*VIRGINIA STATE BOARD APPROVES PERMIT FOR PIPELINE STATION IN HISTORIC AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Centrist Democrats who lost now want to lecture progressives on how to win
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Beto O’Rourke frequently voted for Republican legislation, analysis reveals
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*EMAILS SHOW POLITICAL GROUP NO LABELS GAVE WORK TO FIRMS LINKED TO FOUNDER’S HUSBAND
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Over 90% of the anti-Pelosi Democrats have voted with Trump more often than Pelosi
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Who's Really Leading the Democratic Rebellion Against Pelosi?
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The DC Centrist Democrat Spin Cycle
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*MICHIGAN’S DEMOCRATIC GOVERNOR-ELECT PUTS BLUE CROSS BLUE SHIELD EXECUTIVE ON TRANSITION TEAM — AFTER THE COMPANY FUNDED HER CAMPAIGN(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Banks to target moderate Democrats, regulators if US House flips
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Red-State Senate Democrats Are Top Recipients of Wall Street Donations
(excerpt BELOW)
cartoons(at the end)
Establishment Democrats Are Undermining Medicare for All
BY
Michael Corcoran, Truthout
PUBLISHED
March 17, 2019
The Democratic establishment — deep in the pockets of the health industry — wanted to make sure any blue wave election in 2018 would help sink, rather than support, the growing movement for a single-payer health care system. The recent decline in co-sponsors of the House Medicare for All legislation is, in part, a byproduct of this strategy and a reminder of the great obstacles corporate Democrats have put in front of the single-payer movement.
In 2018, there were 124 cosponsors for the Medicare for All bill in the House (then H.R. 676), representing 66 percent of the Democratic Caucus. This was celebrated widely as a high-water mark for the legislation. So was the release of Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill in the Senate, which also got a record 16 co-sponsors, including prominent Democrats who are running for president.
Given that the Democrats gained 35 seats in the 2018 midterm and Medicare for All has been polling extremely high among Democratic voters — a survey by Reuters from August 2018 showed around 85 percent of Democrats supported the policy — many were hopeful that the number of cosponsors would rise even higher in the current Congress.
Despite this hope, when Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced the new flagship Medicare for All bill (H.R. 1384), the amount of co-sponsors decreasedconsiderably to 106, down to 47 percent of the caucus. So why, if Democratic voters are moving left on health care, is this not reflected in Congress? Where did all the co-sponsors go?
A Truthout analysis shows the primary reasons for this decline are: 1) incumbents who once supported Medicare for All who have defected, and 2) a largely disappointing freshman class.
The most well-known faces of the freshman class are progressives, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, thanks to their ambitious proposals and popular support. This might give the impression to the public that this is reflective of the whole class. The majority of the newest House Democrats, however, were shaped strongly by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the New Democratic Coalition. About 71 percent (42 of 59) of freshman House members declined to co-sponsor the legislation. Some freshman candidates who ran on the issue during the campaign, like Harley Rouda of California, still declined to co-sponsor Jayapal’s bill.
In happier news for the movement, three incumbent Democrats decided to co-sponsor Medicare for All for the first time: Reps. Joseph Kennedy and William Keating of Massachusetts, and Susan Wild of Pennsylvania. However, 29 of the Democrats who were previously co-sponsors have defected this year. Why are Medicare for All’s congressional supporters backing out?
Incumbent Democrats Turning Away
It is much less courageous for members of Congress to co-sponsor legislation that has no chance of passing. So last year, as members of Congress quickly signed on to H.R. 676 some suspicious names appeared on the list (like Joseph Crowley, who had never hinted at support for the policy until he faced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the primary). In the minority, they could add their names while, behind closed doors, giving viable explanations to donors: “Don’t worry, it has no chance of passing — I am just getting re-elected.”
Now that Democrats control the House, this calculus changes for many. Sure enough, 29 incumbents who previously co-sponsored H.R. 676 have failed to co-sponsor the newer bill, which recently was made stronger to include long-term care for elderly and disabled Americans. Among these defectors are Reps. Elijah Cummings, Hakeem Jeffries and Marcy Kaptur.
“It’s another painful but important lesson about the limits of politely pushing elected officials to the left,” writes Alex Panagiotopoulos, who analyzed the defections. “Just because they co-sponsor or promise to support legislation doesn’t mean [they will] expend any political capital to make it happen.”
Adam Gaffney, president of Physicians for a National Health Program, told Truthout that the most important thing is to keep pressuring candidates to support the legislation.
“The movement has been putting pressure on Democrats [that] don’t support it, this kind of work must continue,” he said. (Gaffney recently impressed many with his stirring defense of Medicare for All on Fox Business News.)
Buying the Blue Wave: Why the Freshman Class Is Largely Unsupportive of Single-Payer
When people think of the freshman class of Democrats, the most recognizable names tend to be Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. This makes sense, as they are pushing popular policies — and are constantly attacked by Republicans.
These strong voices of dissent, however, are in the minority in the new Congress. By and large, the freshman class of House Democrats has refused to support single-payer in practice. Of the 59 freshman Democrats elected to Congress this year, only 17 of them (a woeful 29 percent) co-sponsored H.R. 1834.
This was not by chance. It can be traced to the Democratic National Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the corporatist New Democratic Coalition in the House (and its affiliated NewDemPAC). Long before the 2018 midterms were underway, Democratic Party power brokers and fundraisers were militant in trying to keep prospective members of Congress in line going into the 2018 election. This included pleading with new candidates not to support single-payer or, as The Intercept reported with corroborating audio, trying to bully progressives out of the races altogether, depriving voters of a chance to weigh in. Establishment Democrats’ goal was, as Politico reported, to “neutralize the threat” of single-payer.
“Democratic voters want single payer health care. But don’t expect to hear Democratic candidates talk about it,” the report said. “To avoid divisive intraparty fights that drive candidates left — only to be attacked by Republicans for favoring socialized medicine — the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee warned aspirants last year about the political liabilities of endorsing ‘single-payer.’”
Until the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, single-payer was not recognized by most media and politicians as a mainstream proposal (despite its popularity among the public). Sanders energized the movement, putting powerful Democrats and industry stakeholders on guard.
Surely, the leadership of the New Democratic Coalition and similarly minded organizations chalk this up to another victory for the “vital center.” They, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, argue the voters aren’t “ready” for single-payer, despite its massive popularity. This is a rather dubious interpretation, however, given that the DCCC deprived many voters of a chance to vote for a single-payer candidate in their district. Candidates were hand-picked by party officials in many instances, as the Hoyer tape proved.
When seeking candidates in 2018, the DCCC embraced the centrist/corporate Third Way agenda. The New Democratic Coalition, which preaches free markets and is funded largely by Wall Street, endorsed 27 candidates in the 2018 primary. The DCCC, the primary fundraising institution for the House, endorsed 25 of these 27 candidatesvia its Red to Blue list. This provided money, support, opposition research and more, giving these candidates a huge advantage in the primaries. As a result, candidates supporting single-payer found themselves being thwarted, attacked and outspent by their own party leaders, who were defying the wishes of most of their base.
“The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee unleashed a scorched-earth campaign against [House candidate Laura Moser of Texas],” reported Vox, “releasing an opposition memo highlighting past statements Moser made seemingly denigrating her home state.”
Moser, a single-payer supporter, lost to the DCCC’s choice, Lizzy Fletcher, in the primary. Fletcher won the seat and failed to co-sponsor the new Medicare for All bill.
By contrast, the DCCC did not support any of the same House candidates endorsed by the Bernie Sanders-founded organization, Our Revolution, which endorses candidates with a range of progressive views on single-payer and beyond.
The New Democratic Coalition saw 16 of its endorsed candidates win in 2018. Of these 16 candidates, only three co-sponsored the Medicare for All bill in the House. Had the DCCC not gone so far out of its way to oppose single-payer supporters, the outcome may have been quite different. Had they embraced single-payer, the amount of co-sponsors could have risen considerably.
“The problem we have is actually with the Democrats,” said Jessica Early, a nurse practitioner and health care justice organizer, in a 2017 interview with Truthout. “We know how Republicans are going to vote on this issue. The obstacle we face is getting Democrats who will support us into office.”
Can New Democrats Derail Single-Payer?
The term “New Democrats” refers to an ideological and strategic movement that argues the U.S. is fundamentally a center-right country and the Democrats must embrace this — and corporate donors — to win elections. During the 1990s it was the most powerful wing of the party: Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and most of the party’s top names were on board. The New Democrats boasted about helping pass the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which added work requirements to cash and food assistance and was supported mostly by Republicans in Congress. The organization was also hostile to candidates who tried to run as progressives, such as Howard Dean and Ned Lamont in 2004 and 2006 respectively.
This kind of thinking has, for the most part, fallen out of favor: There is virtually no grassroots support for “centrist” moderation. It is a doctrinal assumption, however, made by much of the dominant media, that proposals like single-payer will hurt Democrats in the general election, or in districts that President Trump won in 2016. Third Way, which is run largely by hedge fund managers, advanced this theory in its Winning on Health Care memo in 2016.
“A national debate over single payer is what Republicans want since it would turn health care from a winning Democratic issue into a losing one,” Third Way pleaded.
Many advocates, however, say a national debate over single-payer is exactly what the Democrats – and the United States more generally – need to be having.
“This is a winning issue for the American people and for the Democrats,” Gaffney said. “Now we have to get it done.”
In 2018, there were 124 cosponsors for the Medicare for All bill in the House (then H.R. 676), representing 66 percent of the Democratic Caucus. This was celebrated widely as a high-water mark for the legislation. So was the release of Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill in the Senate, which also got a record 16 co-sponsors, including prominent Democrats who are running for president.
Given that the Democrats gained 35 seats in the 2018 midterm and Medicare for All has been polling extremely high among Democratic voters — a survey by Reuters from August 2018 showed around 85 percent of Democrats supported the policy — many were hopeful that the number of cosponsors would rise even higher in the current Congress.
Despite this hope, when Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced the new flagship Medicare for All bill (H.R. 1384), the amount of co-sponsors decreasedconsiderably to 106, down to 47 percent of the caucus. So why, if Democratic voters are moving left on health care, is this not reflected in Congress? Where did all the co-sponsors go?
A Truthout analysis shows the primary reasons for this decline are: 1) incumbents who once supported Medicare for All who have defected, and 2) a largely disappointing freshman class.
The most well-known faces of the freshman class are progressives, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, thanks to their ambitious proposals and popular support. This might give the impression to the public that this is reflective of the whole class. The majority of the newest House Democrats, however, were shaped strongly by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the New Democratic Coalition. About 71 percent (42 of 59) of freshman House members declined to co-sponsor the legislation. Some freshman candidates who ran on the issue during the campaign, like Harley Rouda of California, still declined to co-sponsor Jayapal’s bill.
In happier news for the movement, three incumbent Democrats decided to co-sponsor Medicare for All for the first time: Reps. Joseph Kennedy and William Keating of Massachusetts, and Susan Wild of Pennsylvania. However, 29 of the Democrats who were previously co-sponsors have defected this year. Why are Medicare for All’s congressional supporters backing out?
Incumbent Democrats Turning Away
It is much less courageous for members of Congress to co-sponsor legislation that has no chance of passing. So last year, as members of Congress quickly signed on to H.R. 676 some suspicious names appeared on the list (like Joseph Crowley, who had never hinted at support for the policy until he faced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the primary). In the minority, they could add their names while, behind closed doors, giving viable explanations to donors: “Don’t worry, it has no chance of passing — I am just getting re-elected.”
Now that Democrats control the House, this calculus changes for many. Sure enough, 29 incumbents who previously co-sponsored H.R. 676 have failed to co-sponsor the newer bill, which recently was made stronger to include long-term care for elderly and disabled Americans. Among these defectors are Reps. Elijah Cummings, Hakeem Jeffries and Marcy Kaptur.
“It’s another painful but important lesson about the limits of politely pushing elected officials to the left,” writes Alex Panagiotopoulos, who analyzed the defections. “Just because they co-sponsor or promise to support legislation doesn’t mean [they will] expend any political capital to make it happen.”
Adam Gaffney, president of Physicians for a National Health Program, told Truthout that the most important thing is to keep pressuring candidates to support the legislation.
“The movement has been putting pressure on Democrats [that] don’t support it, this kind of work must continue,” he said. (Gaffney recently impressed many with his stirring defense of Medicare for All on Fox Business News.)
Buying the Blue Wave: Why the Freshman Class Is Largely Unsupportive of Single-Payer
When people think of the freshman class of Democrats, the most recognizable names tend to be Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. This makes sense, as they are pushing popular policies — and are constantly attacked by Republicans.
These strong voices of dissent, however, are in the minority in the new Congress. By and large, the freshman class of House Democrats has refused to support single-payer in practice. Of the 59 freshman Democrats elected to Congress this year, only 17 of them (a woeful 29 percent) co-sponsored H.R. 1834.
This was not by chance. It can be traced to the Democratic National Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the corporatist New Democratic Coalition in the House (and its affiliated NewDemPAC). Long before the 2018 midterms were underway, Democratic Party power brokers and fundraisers were militant in trying to keep prospective members of Congress in line going into the 2018 election. This included pleading with new candidates not to support single-payer or, as The Intercept reported with corroborating audio, trying to bully progressives out of the races altogether, depriving voters of a chance to weigh in. Establishment Democrats’ goal was, as Politico reported, to “neutralize the threat” of single-payer.
“Democratic voters want single payer health care. But don’t expect to hear Democratic candidates talk about it,” the report said. “To avoid divisive intraparty fights that drive candidates left — only to be attacked by Republicans for favoring socialized medicine — the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee warned aspirants last year about the political liabilities of endorsing ‘single-payer.’”
Until the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, single-payer was not recognized by most media and politicians as a mainstream proposal (despite its popularity among the public). Sanders energized the movement, putting powerful Democrats and industry stakeholders on guard.
Surely, the leadership of the New Democratic Coalition and similarly minded organizations chalk this up to another victory for the “vital center.” They, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, argue the voters aren’t “ready” for single-payer, despite its massive popularity. This is a rather dubious interpretation, however, given that the DCCC deprived many voters of a chance to vote for a single-payer candidate in their district. Candidates were hand-picked by party officials in many instances, as the Hoyer tape proved.
When seeking candidates in 2018, the DCCC embraced the centrist/corporate Third Way agenda. The New Democratic Coalition, which preaches free markets and is funded largely by Wall Street, endorsed 27 candidates in the 2018 primary. The DCCC, the primary fundraising institution for the House, endorsed 25 of these 27 candidatesvia its Red to Blue list. This provided money, support, opposition research and more, giving these candidates a huge advantage in the primaries. As a result, candidates supporting single-payer found themselves being thwarted, attacked and outspent by their own party leaders, who were defying the wishes of most of their base.
“The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee unleashed a scorched-earth campaign against [House candidate Laura Moser of Texas],” reported Vox, “releasing an opposition memo highlighting past statements Moser made seemingly denigrating her home state.”
Moser, a single-payer supporter, lost to the DCCC’s choice, Lizzy Fletcher, in the primary. Fletcher won the seat and failed to co-sponsor the new Medicare for All bill.
By contrast, the DCCC did not support any of the same House candidates endorsed by the Bernie Sanders-founded organization, Our Revolution, which endorses candidates with a range of progressive views on single-payer and beyond.
The New Democratic Coalition saw 16 of its endorsed candidates win in 2018. Of these 16 candidates, only three co-sponsored the Medicare for All bill in the House. Had the DCCC not gone so far out of its way to oppose single-payer supporters, the outcome may have been quite different. Had they embraced single-payer, the amount of co-sponsors could have risen considerably.
“The problem we have is actually with the Democrats,” said Jessica Early, a nurse practitioner and health care justice organizer, in a 2017 interview with Truthout. “We know how Republicans are going to vote on this issue. The obstacle we face is getting Democrats who will support us into office.”
Can New Democrats Derail Single-Payer?
The term “New Democrats” refers to an ideological and strategic movement that argues the U.S. is fundamentally a center-right country and the Democrats must embrace this — and corporate donors — to win elections. During the 1990s it was the most powerful wing of the party: Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and most of the party’s top names were on board. The New Democrats boasted about helping pass the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which added work requirements to cash and food assistance and was supported mostly by Republicans in Congress. The organization was also hostile to candidates who tried to run as progressives, such as Howard Dean and Ned Lamont in 2004 and 2006 respectively.
This kind of thinking has, for the most part, fallen out of favor: There is virtually no grassroots support for “centrist” moderation. It is a doctrinal assumption, however, made by much of the dominant media, that proposals like single-payer will hurt Democrats in the general election, or in districts that President Trump won in 2016. Third Way, which is run largely by hedge fund managers, advanced this theory in its Winning on Health Care memo in 2016.
“A national debate over single payer is what Republicans want since it would turn health care from a winning Democratic issue into a losing one,” Third Way pleaded.
Many advocates, however, say a national debate over single-payer is exactly what the Democrats – and the United States more generally – need to be having.
“This is a winning issue for the American people and for the Democrats,” Gaffney said. “Now we have to get it done.”
EXXON, BIG PHARMA, AND WALL STREET LOBBYISTS TO HOST FUNDRAISER FOR MARK KELLY IN WASHINGTON
Akela Lacy - the intercept
March 12 2019, 9:52 a.m.
ARIZONA SENATE CANDIDATE Mark Kelly will appear later this month at a high-dollar fundraiser in Washington, D.C. hosted by one of the city’s top corporate lobbying firms. The K Street firm represents major fossil fuel companies, including Exxon Mobil and Chevron; Wall Street banks such as JPMorgan Chase; defense industry giant Lockheed Martin; and the lobby group PhRMA.
Kelly’s fundraiser with the corporate lobbying behemoth comes as he launched his campaign on the back of a pledge not to accept corporate PAC donations. Indeed, the invitation to the fundraiser, obtained by The Intercept, specifies that attendees should not pay with corporate PAC checks.
Instead, those lobbyists will be asked to pay with personal checks, meaning that disclosure records will not reflect any contributions from drug makers, banks, or any other clients associated with the lobbying firm, Capitol Counsel.
The firm also represents Walmart, the NFL, Comcast, the American Health Care Association, the Health Care Service Corporation, the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, Edison Electric Institute, the National Business Aviation Association, and the Internet and Television Association.
The fundraiser comes as the old way of doing politics through big-money fundraising is colliding with a new model based on small donors. But the new paradigm has yet to fully take hold, which is leading candidates to try to mold the old approach to fit the new anti-corporate money mood.
Kelly clearly recognizes the salience of political corruption as an issue and criticized corporate influence in politics as part of his launch video, saying that “partisanship and polarization and gerrymandering and corporate money have ruined our politics.”
“This campaign is about the people of Arizona, not corporate PACs and the mess they’ve created in Washington,” Kelly is quoted as saying on his campaign website. “I won’t take a dime of corporate PAC money, and I’ll only answer to Arizonans.”
But the K Street fundraiser is just one link with corporate money that remains intact. Kelly on Monday spoke at the corporate-funded SHARE Technology Exchange expo in Phoenix, which describes itself as “the largest convergence of enterprise IT professionals.” Both Broadcom and IBM — whose executives will speak at the conference later this week — are the event’s top sponsors, alongside Dell EMC, Hitachi, Rocket Software, and others.
Democrats, once close allies with big tech, have begun to view the industry more skeptically, as a handful of firms have increasingly come to dominate the field. It is unusual for a candidate to continue to give paid corporate speeches after the launch of a campaign, as it allows companies to give directly to the individual, rather than support the person’s campaign by going through a Super PAC or the firm’s corporate PAC.
Broadcom has faced international and congressional scrutiny in recent years for a series of merger attempts that alarmed antitrust advocates — one of which President Donald Trump blocked. Bain Capital, the famed private equity firm known for chewing up and spitting out smaller companies, orchestrating tax-evasion schemes, and buying out a for-profit hospital chain, last year bought a majority stake in Rocket Software. The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2015 brought charges against Japanese conglomerate Hitachi for making improper payments to the African National Congress’s investment company and subsequently securing contracts to construct two power plants. Hitachi paid $19 million to settle the charges.
Kelly’s campaign told The Intercept that his previous speeches were a way to make ends meet in the wake of the assassination attempt on his wife, former Rep. Gabby Giffords. His campaign spokesperson, Jacob Peters, said Kelly would keep engagements he’d already committed to, but wouldn’t be adding any others. And Peters pointed out that the content of Kelly’s speeches is always pretty much the same: detailing his experiences as an astronaut and his and Giffords’s journey after the 2011 shooting. The campaign said Kelly does not discuss policy or his campaign at the speeches.
Peters told The Intercept that Kelly’s lobbyist-hosted fundraiser “is not a paid speech,” and that the SHARE engagement was a prior commitment.
The Intercept previously reported that Kelly has given paid speeches to the likes of Goldman Sachs, the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit, and opioid giant AmerisourceBergen.
The fundraiser, scheduled for March 26 in Washington, D.C., is being co-hosted by Capitol Counsel’s Jenn Fogel-Bublick, Drew Goesl, Josh Kardon, Ethan Pittleman, as well as Andy Rosenberg of Thorn Run Partners.
Fogel-Bublick served as counsel to the Senate Banking Committee and worked with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She was formerly the legislative director at the National Low Income Housing Coalition and former executive vice president of McBee Strategic (now Signal Group). Her clients at Capitol Counsel include the National Low Income Housing Coalition, JPMorgan Chase, Planned Parenthood, and SunTrust Bank.
As a chief of staff for former Arkansas Democratic Rep. Mike Ross, Goesl worked to advance the legislative priorities of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition, which Ross chaired. He was also communications director for former Arkansas Democratic Rep. Blanche Lincoln. In his role at Capitol Counsel, he has worked to permanently decrease taxes on capital gains and dividends. He also worked to help pass Congress’s 2017 tax reform bill. He’s represented Merck, Las Vegas Sands, PhRMA, and Comcast, among others.
Kardon, former senior vice president at the Capitol Hill Consulting Group, was previously chief of staff to former California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, served as her legislative director, and advised her on energy and environmental issues. He served as chief of staff to Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, directed subcommittee staff under former Michigan Democratic Rep. John Conyers, and was Oregon chair for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Among the companies he’s represented are Exxon Mobil, Walmart, and Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Pittleman was formerly a policy adviser to Oregon Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader, a Blue Dog co-chair, and deputy director of federal affairs for former Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber. His current clients include the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, the National Parks Conservation Association, and the American Health Care Association.
Rosenberg was previously a Hill staffer for the Senate HELP Committee and worked on former Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Kennedy’s personal staff. He co-founded and was a senior adviser to Draft Obama, a grassroots organization that encouraged Barack Obama to run for president, which is now setting its sights on his wife, Michelle. He also consulted for the Democratic National Committee on election law and coordinated the DNC’s 2004 Philadelphia-area Voter Protection Initiative. Rosenberg advised John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign on health care and policy in the Middle East. In 2004, he also ran for Congress in Virginia’s 8th Congressional District. His clients at Thorn Run include GlaxoSmithKline, the Medical Device Manufacturers Association, Novartis AG, and Partnership for Part D Access.
Kelly will likely face a primary challenge from Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego in the 2020 race for the seat currently held by Republican Sen. Martha McSally. She was appointed to fill the seat vacated by Sen. Jon Kyl, who took Sen. John McCain’s place after his death. The race sets up an opportunity for Arizona to be represented by two Democratic senators for the first time in over 60 years.
As progressive candidates across the country demonstrate that they can win, with or without help from establishment Democrats, many have sworn off corporate PAC money and adopted stances to appeal to voters disenchanted with the status quo. But signing a pledge is one thing. Cutting off corporate influence altogether is another, particularly in Kelly’s case.
The state has moved further left in recent years, and Kelly has taken note, campaigning on combating climate change and lowering prescription drug prices, as well as universal health care coverage. Kelly has also made gun control a priority since the assassination attempt on Giffords. And he says he’ll continue that push should he reach the Senate. Gallego has made a name for himself in Congress by advocating for Medicare for All and protection for Dreamers, among other progressive policies. Gallego himself has taken $763,849 in corporate PAC donations over the course of his career. He told The Intercept that his team hadn’t yet discussed whether his campaign would continuing accepting those contributions should he run for Senate.
Kelly’s fundraiser with the corporate lobbying behemoth comes as he launched his campaign on the back of a pledge not to accept corporate PAC donations. Indeed, the invitation to the fundraiser, obtained by The Intercept, specifies that attendees should not pay with corporate PAC checks.
Instead, those lobbyists will be asked to pay with personal checks, meaning that disclosure records will not reflect any contributions from drug makers, banks, or any other clients associated with the lobbying firm, Capitol Counsel.
The firm also represents Walmart, the NFL, Comcast, the American Health Care Association, the Health Care Service Corporation, the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, Edison Electric Institute, the National Business Aviation Association, and the Internet and Television Association.
The fundraiser comes as the old way of doing politics through big-money fundraising is colliding with a new model based on small donors. But the new paradigm has yet to fully take hold, which is leading candidates to try to mold the old approach to fit the new anti-corporate money mood.
Kelly clearly recognizes the salience of political corruption as an issue and criticized corporate influence in politics as part of his launch video, saying that “partisanship and polarization and gerrymandering and corporate money have ruined our politics.”
“This campaign is about the people of Arizona, not corporate PACs and the mess they’ve created in Washington,” Kelly is quoted as saying on his campaign website. “I won’t take a dime of corporate PAC money, and I’ll only answer to Arizonans.”
But the K Street fundraiser is just one link with corporate money that remains intact. Kelly on Monday spoke at the corporate-funded SHARE Technology Exchange expo in Phoenix, which describes itself as “the largest convergence of enterprise IT professionals.” Both Broadcom and IBM — whose executives will speak at the conference later this week — are the event’s top sponsors, alongside Dell EMC, Hitachi, Rocket Software, and others.
Democrats, once close allies with big tech, have begun to view the industry more skeptically, as a handful of firms have increasingly come to dominate the field. It is unusual for a candidate to continue to give paid corporate speeches after the launch of a campaign, as it allows companies to give directly to the individual, rather than support the person’s campaign by going through a Super PAC or the firm’s corporate PAC.
Broadcom has faced international and congressional scrutiny in recent years for a series of merger attempts that alarmed antitrust advocates — one of which President Donald Trump blocked. Bain Capital, the famed private equity firm known for chewing up and spitting out smaller companies, orchestrating tax-evasion schemes, and buying out a for-profit hospital chain, last year bought a majority stake in Rocket Software. The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2015 brought charges against Japanese conglomerate Hitachi for making improper payments to the African National Congress’s investment company and subsequently securing contracts to construct two power plants. Hitachi paid $19 million to settle the charges.
Kelly’s campaign told The Intercept that his previous speeches were a way to make ends meet in the wake of the assassination attempt on his wife, former Rep. Gabby Giffords. His campaign spokesperson, Jacob Peters, said Kelly would keep engagements he’d already committed to, but wouldn’t be adding any others. And Peters pointed out that the content of Kelly’s speeches is always pretty much the same: detailing his experiences as an astronaut and his and Giffords’s journey after the 2011 shooting. The campaign said Kelly does not discuss policy or his campaign at the speeches.
Peters told The Intercept that Kelly’s lobbyist-hosted fundraiser “is not a paid speech,” and that the SHARE engagement was a prior commitment.
The Intercept previously reported that Kelly has given paid speeches to the likes of Goldman Sachs, the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit, and opioid giant AmerisourceBergen.
The fundraiser, scheduled for March 26 in Washington, D.C., is being co-hosted by Capitol Counsel’s Jenn Fogel-Bublick, Drew Goesl, Josh Kardon, Ethan Pittleman, as well as Andy Rosenberg of Thorn Run Partners.
Fogel-Bublick served as counsel to the Senate Banking Committee and worked with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She was formerly the legislative director at the National Low Income Housing Coalition and former executive vice president of McBee Strategic (now Signal Group). Her clients at Capitol Counsel include the National Low Income Housing Coalition, JPMorgan Chase, Planned Parenthood, and SunTrust Bank.
As a chief of staff for former Arkansas Democratic Rep. Mike Ross, Goesl worked to advance the legislative priorities of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition, which Ross chaired. He was also communications director for former Arkansas Democratic Rep. Blanche Lincoln. In his role at Capitol Counsel, he has worked to permanently decrease taxes on capital gains and dividends. He also worked to help pass Congress’s 2017 tax reform bill. He’s represented Merck, Las Vegas Sands, PhRMA, and Comcast, among others.
Kardon, former senior vice president at the Capitol Hill Consulting Group, was previously chief of staff to former California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, served as her legislative director, and advised her on energy and environmental issues. He served as chief of staff to Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, directed subcommittee staff under former Michigan Democratic Rep. John Conyers, and was Oregon chair for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Among the companies he’s represented are Exxon Mobil, Walmart, and Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Pittleman was formerly a policy adviser to Oregon Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader, a Blue Dog co-chair, and deputy director of federal affairs for former Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber. His current clients include the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, the National Parks Conservation Association, and the American Health Care Association.
Rosenberg was previously a Hill staffer for the Senate HELP Committee and worked on former Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Kennedy’s personal staff. He co-founded and was a senior adviser to Draft Obama, a grassroots organization that encouraged Barack Obama to run for president, which is now setting its sights on his wife, Michelle. He also consulted for the Democratic National Committee on election law and coordinated the DNC’s 2004 Philadelphia-area Voter Protection Initiative. Rosenberg advised John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign on health care and policy in the Middle East. In 2004, he also ran for Congress in Virginia’s 8th Congressional District. His clients at Thorn Run include GlaxoSmithKline, the Medical Device Manufacturers Association, Novartis AG, and Partnership for Part D Access.
Kelly will likely face a primary challenge from Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego in the 2020 race for the seat currently held by Republican Sen. Martha McSally. She was appointed to fill the seat vacated by Sen. Jon Kyl, who took Sen. John McCain’s place after his death. The race sets up an opportunity for Arizona to be represented by two Democratic senators for the first time in over 60 years.
As progressive candidates across the country demonstrate that they can win, with or without help from establishment Democrats, many have sworn off corporate PAC money and adopted stances to appeal to voters disenchanted with the status quo. But signing a pledge is one thing. Cutting off corporate influence altogether is another, particularly in Kelly’s case.
The state has moved further left in recent years, and Kelly has taken note, campaigning on combating climate change and lowering prescription drug prices, as well as universal health care coverage. Kelly has also made gun control a priority since the assassination attempt on Giffords. And he says he’ll continue that push should he reach the Senate. Gallego has made a name for himself in Congress by advocating for Medicare for All and protection for Dreamers, among other progressive policies. Gallego himself has taken $763,849 in corporate PAC donations over the course of his career. He told The Intercept that his team hadn’t yet discussed whether his campaign would continuing accepting those contributions should he run for Senate.
Senate Democrats Enabled the Biggest Bank Merger Since the 2008 Crash
BY
Sam Knight, Truthout
PUBLISHED
March 10, 2019
When Senate Democrats teamed up with Republicans last year to pass banking deregulation, they went all in, parroting conservative talking points about running to the rescue of Main Street. More than half of the Democrats who backed the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (S.2155) invoked “credit unions and small banks” when explaining their vote.
Less than nine months after it was signed into law, however, the legislation has already paved the way for the largest bank merger since the 2008 financial crisis — the proposed purchase of SunTrust by BB&T. Their integration would create the sixth-largest bank in the country.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of campaign donations last election cycle from those two banks to Senate Democrats went to supporters of “regulatory relief,” according to campaign finance disclosures aggregated by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Individuals and entities related to BB&T gave $10,331 to Senate Democrats; 93 percent of that went to supporters of S.2155. SunTrust affiliates gave $39,762 to Senate Democrats, 97.3 percent of which went to backers of the bill. The majority of the money came from the firms’ political action committees, not from employees.
Members of the Senate Democratic caucus who mentioned “small banks and credit unions” to boost S.2155 included Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), Mark Warner (D-Virginia), Tom Carper (D-Delaware), Chris Coons (D-Delaware), Jon Tester (D-Montana), Gary Peters (D-Michigan), Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan), Doug Jones (D-Alabama) and Angus King (I-Maine); and ex-Senators Joe Donnelly (D-Indiana) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-North Dakota). Together, they and other Democrats joined with Republicans to give the legislation filibuster-proof support in the Senate. Initial co-sponsors also included Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) and ex-Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri).
Notable among lawmakers still serving: Senator Manchin received $5,000 tied to SunTrust; Senator Tester got $2,005. Senators Kaine and Warner each received $1,800 and $1,000 respectively. Meanwhile, Senator Jones received $6,755 from BB&T-related entities and individuals; Sentor Manchin received $1,100. Senators Carper and Kaine were each given $1,000 and $555 respectively.
According to lobbying disclosure forms, S.2155 was hugely important to both SunTrust and BB&T. Filings mention the bill as the only piece of legislation that crossed the desk of BB&T’s legislative affairs team in 2018. SunTrust lobbyists mentioned S.2155 in half of their disclosuresfrom last year.
As its boosters claimed, the legislation did change certain rules governing smaller firms, whether or not one considers that a positive attribute of banking legislation. Some relief contained in S.2155, for example, involved exemptions for smaller banks from rules against speculation with federally insured deposits. Other provisions gave smaller banks an out from requirements forcing them to report data collected to combat racial discrimination in mortgage lending.
But S.2155 also relaxed rules on some of the largest depository institutions in the country — by tweaking Dodd-Frank reforms passed in 2010 to head off future meltdowns. One section forces the Federal Reserve to customize rules for banks with more than $100 billion in assets, rather than merely giving the central bank the option to tailor the rules, as had been previously allowed. The law also loosened a set of enhanced regulations on banks with assets between $50 billion and $250 billion — some of the largest institutions in the country.
As noted by The Intercept, this gave both SunTrust and BB&T extra resources and wiggle room to focus on hashing out merger plans. Forbessaid the changes would save impacted banks “millions in regulatory compliance costs.” BB&T and SunTrust respectively have about $220 billion and $210 billion in assets.
While S.2155 was making its way through Congress, supporters said that the bill didn’t strip authority from regulators, claiming it merely provided the federal government with more discretion to use its power. Critics like Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) noted that the Trump administration has shown little interest in overseeing the financial sector, and that the statutory changes will invite more neglect, particularly at the Fed, which oversees merger proposals alongside the Justice Department Antitrust Division.
In response to the BB&T-SunTrust merger proposal, Senator Warren released Fed data and analysis showing that the central bank increasingly waves through merger approvals. Between 2006 and 2017, the Fed approved 86.8 percent of all proposed bank acquisitions. By the tail end of that time frame, the approval rate rose to more than 89 percent, reaching above 94 percent after Trump took office. The most recent data show the Fed greenlighting “94.4 percent of mergers in the first half of 2018,” Warren noted.
When Warren brought up the issue during a congressional hearing on February 26, Fed Chair Jerome Powell replied by pointing out that the approval rate doesn’t account for withdrawn applications. But the senator had criticized withdrawals too, noting they suggest that there are inappropriate interactions between the Fed, a neutral government arbiter, and private-sector actors with business before it.
“Is this one just going to be another rubber stamp?” she asked Powell, of the BB&T-SunTrust merger. “You’ve already made the decision behind closed doors before the public gets a chance to weigh in?”
Powell denied the charge, saying the Fed will “conduct a very fair, open and transparent process.” He said the central bank has not even received the merger application yet. Warren replied the Fed would likely create “yet another too-big-to-fail bank” after it did receive the paperwork.
When BB&T and SunTrust announced their proposed merger last month, the two firms said it would enable them to invest in technology and collectively save $1.6 billion through “net cost synergies.” One critic described this claim as PR-fluff for “layoffs.” Bartlett Naylor, a financial expert at consumer watchdog Public Citizen, also predicted that the merger would bring more market concentration at a time when half of Americans’ checking accounts are already controlled by four banks (Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup).
“If the business case for this merger is premised on expanding market share to raise fees and rates — that harms consumers,” Naylor said. He added that policymakers should take the opportunity “to examine when banks become too big, as this won’t be the last proposed major deal.”
Less than nine months after it was signed into law, however, the legislation has already paved the way for the largest bank merger since the 2008 financial crisis — the proposed purchase of SunTrust by BB&T. Their integration would create the sixth-largest bank in the country.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of campaign donations last election cycle from those two banks to Senate Democrats went to supporters of “regulatory relief,” according to campaign finance disclosures aggregated by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Individuals and entities related to BB&T gave $10,331 to Senate Democrats; 93 percent of that went to supporters of S.2155. SunTrust affiliates gave $39,762 to Senate Democrats, 97.3 percent of which went to backers of the bill. The majority of the money came from the firms’ political action committees, not from employees.
Members of the Senate Democratic caucus who mentioned “small banks and credit unions” to boost S.2155 included Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), Mark Warner (D-Virginia), Tom Carper (D-Delaware), Chris Coons (D-Delaware), Jon Tester (D-Montana), Gary Peters (D-Michigan), Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan), Doug Jones (D-Alabama) and Angus King (I-Maine); and ex-Senators Joe Donnelly (D-Indiana) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-North Dakota). Together, they and other Democrats joined with Republicans to give the legislation filibuster-proof support in the Senate. Initial co-sponsors also included Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) and ex-Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri).
Notable among lawmakers still serving: Senator Manchin received $5,000 tied to SunTrust; Senator Tester got $2,005. Senators Kaine and Warner each received $1,800 and $1,000 respectively. Meanwhile, Senator Jones received $6,755 from BB&T-related entities and individuals; Sentor Manchin received $1,100. Senators Carper and Kaine were each given $1,000 and $555 respectively.
According to lobbying disclosure forms, S.2155 was hugely important to both SunTrust and BB&T. Filings mention the bill as the only piece of legislation that crossed the desk of BB&T’s legislative affairs team in 2018. SunTrust lobbyists mentioned S.2155 in half of their disclosuresfrom last year.
As its boosters claimed, the legislation did change certain rules governing smaller firms, whether or not one considers that a positive attribute of banking legislation. Some relief contained in S.2155, for example, involved exemptions for smaller banks from rules against speculation with federally insured deposits. Other provisions gave smaller banks an out from requirements forcing them to report data collected to combat racial discrimination in mortgage lending.
But S.2155 also relaxed rules on some of the largest depository institutions in the country — by tweaking Dodd-Frank reforms passed in 2010 to head off future meltdowns. One section forces the Federal Reserve to customize rules for banks with more than $100 billion in assets, rather than merely giving the central bank the option to tailor the rules, as had been previously allowed. The law also loosened a set of enhanced regulations on banks with assets between $50 billion and $250 billion — some of the largest institutions in the country.
As noted by The Intercept, this gave both SunTrust and BB&T extra resources and wiggle room to focus on hashing out merger plans. Forbessaid the changes would save impacted banks “millions in regulatory compliance costs.” BB&T and SunTrust respectively have about $220 billion and $210 billion in assets.
While S.2155 was making its way through Congress, supporters said that the bill didn’t strip authority from regulators, claiming it merely provided the federal government with more discretion to use its power. Critics like Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) noted that the Trump administration has shown little interest in overseeing the financial sector, and that the statutory changes will invite more neglect, particularly at the Fed, which oversees merger proposals alongside the Justice Department Antitrust Division.
In response to the BB&T-SunTrust merger proposal, Senator Warren released Fed data and analysis showing that the central bank increasingly waves through merger approvals. Between 2006 and 2017, the Fed approved 86.8 percent of all proposed bank acquisitions. By the tail end of that time frame, the approval rate rose to more than 89 percent, reaching above 94 percent after Trump took office. The most recent data show the Fed greenlighting “94.4 percent of mergers in the first half of 2018,” Warren noted.
When Warren brought up the issue during a congressional hearing on February 26, Fed Chair Jerome Powell replied by pointing out that the approval rate doesn’t account for withdrawn applications. But the senator had criticized withdrawals too, noting they suggest that there are inappropriate interactions between the Fed, a neutral government arbiter, and private-sector actors with business before it.
“Is this one just going to be another rubber stamp?” she asked Powell, of the BB&T-SunTrust merger. “You’ve already made the decision behind closed doors before the public gets a chance to weigh in?”
Powell denied the charge, saying the Fed will “conduct a very fair, open and transparent process.” He said the central bank has not even received the merger application yet. Warren replied the Fed would likely create “yet another too-big-to-fail bank” after it did receive the paperwork.
When BB&T and SunTrust announced their proposed merger last month, the two firms said it would enable them to invest in technology and collectively save $1.6 billion through “net cost synergies.” One critic described this claim as PR-fluff for “layoffs.” Bartlett Naylor, a financial expert at consumer watchdog Public Citizen, also predicted that the merger would bring more market concentration at a time when half of Americans’ checking accounts are already controlled by four banks (Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup).
“If the business case for this merger is premised on expanding market share to raise fees and rates — that harms consumers,” Naylor said. He added that policymakers should take the opportunity “to examine when banks become too big, as this won’t be the last proposed major deal.”
op - ed: “Moderate” Democrats Are Really Conservatives — and They Are Dangerous
BY
William Rivers Pitt, Truthout
PUBLISHED
March 5, 2019
If I hear the word “moderate” used one more time to describe Blue Dog House Democrats who keep voting with Republicans, or any other non-Republican who actively supports today’s Republican Party, it is entirely possible I will eat my teeth. The term “Blue Dog” is a metaphor for a dog straining so hard on its leash that it has turned blue from lack of oxygen; the dog is a right-leaning Democrat, and the leash represents its tenuous party affiliation. These people are conservatives — period, end of file — who hide behind the “moderate” label even as they undermine policies Democrats have hewed to for half a century.
They are able to do this, thanks in no small part to the committed care and feeding of big-paper/big-network reporters, editorialists and producers, many of whom haven’t entertained a new idea since Windows 3.1 was the hot new thing. A recent spirited meeting of House Democrats gave these media types yet another chance to strut their fogbound stuff even as they gave cover to their “moderate” friends who, if you believe the mainstream stenographers out there, have it all figured out.
Their fallback tactic is ease: Inaccurate labeling stands in substitution for analysis because it is easier, tropes outmatch facts because they are easier, and lies from “important people” are not simply allowed to stand, but to flourish. Why? Because it is easier.
“House Democrats exploded in recriminations Thursday over moderates bucking the party, with liberal Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threatening to put those voting with Republicans ‘on a list’ for a primary challenge,” reads the opening line of last week’s febrific Washington Post article on the Democrats’ meeting, only the most recent example of the practice.
There are 137 words in the first four paragraphs of that thoroughly frantic report, a bunch of which clearly strive to become lit sticks of dynamite in the next life. Exploded! Moderates bucking the party! Threatening! On a list! Primary challenge! Frustrated! Lashed out! Pressured! Unquestioned media superstar! Upped the ante! Admonishing! Liberal activists! Unseat! On a list, again! Would that I had pearls to clutch.
“Unquestioned media superstar” takes the biscuit in paragraph three, however. The term refers to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez while simultaneously dismissing her intelligence, skills, passion, wit, will and political savvy by turning her into another bit of TV fluff that will only be popular until the next big hot-minute celebrity comes along. She is bigger than that by many long miles, and those who can’t or won’t acknowledge that are setting themselves up for one hell of a surprise.
What was this House Democrats’ meeting about, anyway? Why were Democrats “exploding” over “moderates’” behavior? The meeting centered around the use and misuse of a legislative maneuver called a “motion to recommit.” It allows the minority party to add amendments to a bill just before it is brought to a vote. The rule exists to keep the majority party from wielding unlimited legislative power, and is something each party protects for the day when they find themselves in the minority. Ever since the Democrats took control of the House, Republicans have been using the rule to stick abrasive nonsense amendments to important bills.
“On Wednesday,” reports Paul Blest for Splinter News, “the House passed a major gun control bill that is sure to die in the Senate, but which laid down an important marker of the party’s priorities. Before that, however, a Republican amendment to the bill that would notify ICE when an undocumented person buys a gun was offered up and shockingly passed, due in part to the votes of 26 House Democrats — many of them members of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition caucus. This wasn’t a trade for ‘bipartisanship.’ Only eight Republicans voted for the final bill itself. Twenty-six Democrats just gave them a racist amendment for free.”
Speaker Pelosi, who ran the “explosive” meeting, was in high dudgeon and for good reason. In the eight years the GOP held the majority in that chamber, the Democrats were unable to pass a single “motion to recommit” because there were never enough Republican votes to help them do it. Since January, and because of these Blue Dog “moderates,” minority House Republicans have already managed to get two stapled to legislation. “Vote no,” admonished Pelosi, “just vote no, because the fact is, a vote yes is to give leverage to the other side.”
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t messing around, either. “When activists ask her why she had to vote for a gun safety bill that also further empowers an agency that forcibly injects kids with psychotropic drugs,” said Ocasio-Cortez spokesman Corbin Trent about the meeting described in the Washington Post article, “they’re going to want a list of names and she’s going to give it to them.” At the conclusion of the meeting, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez herself said, “I think it is an extension of Trump’s tactics into the House, and we cannot legitimatize it and we cannot allow for it and we cannot support it.”
While it is gratifying that enough conservative Democrats won in 2018 to alter the balance of power in the House, that altered balance is utterly meaningless if the Republicans are still allowed to call the shots. House Republicans wanted to jam the words “illegal immigrants” into a Democratic gun bill as a means of putting a tack on Speaker Pelosi’s chair, and the Blue Dogs were their willing dupes.
The background checks legislation passed by the House last week was the most important bill on the gun violence crisis passed by that chamber in decades. There has already been a vote on the Green New Deal, and there will be more to come on equally important Democratic priorities. These Blue Dogs need to wise up on a tactical level, or they are going to find out what life is like on the back bench with no committee assignments and a primary opponent who has Ocasio-Cortez on speed dial.
In the meantime, can we please dispense with the notion that these Blue Dog types are “moderates”? If they vote with conservatives, they are conservatives.
Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are not part of some far-out faction to be marginalized by the puddle-minded media; they are the moderate Democrats. The clear-sighted policies they espouse — addressing the immediate threats of climate change, gun violence and wildly expensive health care to name but a few — are deeply pragmatic necessities.
Furthermore, these policies are all wildly popular with voters on both sides of the ideological spectrum, and can be paid for with an adjustment of our national priorities. The F-35 Lightning II fighter aircraft is expected to cost at least $1.5 trillion before all is said and done. I can think of a few coastal cities which could use that money to stave off the ocean, which is coming, whether we like it or not. It’s either that, or the “conservatives” can try to bail the onrushing tides out of the boulevards with the alms bowls they usually fill with oil and coal dollars. The choice has become that stark.
It is time for the Blue Dogs and their media pals to get with the program and stop hiding behind meaningless labels and discredited tropes. The avalanche has begun, and the pebbles are taking the ride whether they like it or not. If they want to be on the right, they can try being on the right side of history, if there is anyone left to write it.
They are able to do this, thanks in no small part to the committed care and feeding of big-paper/big-network reporters, editorialists and producers, many of whom haven’t entertained a new idea since Windows 3.1 was the hot new thing. A recent spirited meeting of House Democrats gave these media types yet another chance to strut their fogbound stuff even as they gave cover to their “moderate” friends who, if you believe the mainstream stenographers out there, have it all figured out.
Their fallback tactic is ease: Inaccurate labeling stands in substitution for analysis because it is easier, tropes outmatch facts because they are easier, and lies from “important people” are not simply allowed to stand, but to flourish. Why? Because it is easier.
“House Democrats exploded in recriminations Thursday over moderates bucking the party, with liberal Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threatening to put those voting with Republicans ‘on a list’ for a primary challenge,” reads the opening line of last week’s febrific Washington Post article on the Democrats’ meeting, only the most recent example of the practice.
There are 137 words in the first four paragraphs of that thoroughly frantic report, a bunch of which clearly strive to become lit sticks of dynamite in the next life. Exploded! Moderates bucking the party! Threatening! On a list! Primary challenge! Frustrated! Lashed out! Pressured! Unquestioned media superstar! Upped the ante! Admonishing! Liberal activists! Unseat! On a list, again! Would that I had pearls to clutch.
“Unquestioned media superstar” takes the biscuit in paragraph three, however. The term refers to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez while simultaneously dismissing her intelligence, skills, passion, wit, will and political savvy by turning her into another bit of TV fluff that will only be popular until the next big hot-minute celebrity comes along. She is bigger than that by many long miles, and those who can’t or won’t acknowledge that are setting themselves up for one hell of a surprise.
What was this House Democrats’ meeting about, anyway? Why were Democrats “exploding” over “moderates’” behavior? The meeting centered around the use and misuse of a legislative maneuver called a “motion to recommit.” It allows the minority party to add amendments to a bill just before it is brought to a vote. The rule exists to keep the majority party from wielding unlimited legislative power, and is something each party protects for the day when they find themselves in the minority. Ever since the Democrats took control of the House, Republicans have been using the rule to stick abrasive nonsense amendments to important bills.
“On Wednesday,” reports Paul Blest for Splinter News, “the House passed a major gun control bill that is sure to die in the Senate, but which laid down an important marker of the party’s priorities. Before that, however, a Republican amendment to the bill that would notify ICE when an undocumented person buys a gun was offered up and shockingly passed, due in part to the votes of 26 House Democrats — many of them members of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition caucus. This wasn’t a trade for ‘bipartisanship.’ Only eight Republicans voted for the final bill itself. Twenty-six Democrats just gave them a racist amendment for free.”
Speaker Pelosi, who ran the “explosive” meeting, was in high dudgeon and for good reason. In the eight years the GOP held the majority in that chamber, the Democrats were unable to pass a single “motion to recommit” because there were never enough Republican votes to help them do it. Since January, and because of these Blue Dog “moderates,” minority House Republicans have already managed to get two stapled to legislation. “Vote no,” admonished Pelosi, “just vote no, because the fact is, a vote yes is to give leverage to the other side.”
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t messing around, either. “When activists ask her why she had to vote for a gun safety bill that also further empowers an agency that forcibly injects kids with psychotropic drugs,” said Ocasio-Cortez spokesman Corbin Trent about the meeting described in the Washington Post article, “they’re going to want a list of names and she’s going to give it to them.” At the conclusion of the meeting, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez herself said, “I think it is an extension of Trump’s tactics into the House, and we cannot legitimatize it and we cannot allow for it and we cannot support it.”
While it is gratifying that enough conservative Democrats won in 2018 to alter the balance of power in the House, that altered balance is utterly meaningless if the Republicans are still allowed to call the shots. House Republicans wanted to jam the words “illegal immigrants” into a Democratic gun bill as a means of putting a tack on Speaker Pelosi’s chair, and the Blue Dogs were their willing dupes.
The background checks legislation passed by the House last week was the most important bill on the gun violence crisis passed by that chamber in decades. There has already been a vote on the Green New Deal, and there will be more to come on equally important Democratic priorities. These Blue Dogs need to wise up on a tactical level, or they are going to find out what life is like on the back bench with no committee assignments and a primary opponent who has Ocasio-Cortez on speed dial.
In the meantime, can we please dispense with the notion that these Blue Dog types are “moderates”? If they vote with conservatives, they are conservatives.
Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are not part of some far-out faction to be marginalized by the puddle-minded media; they are the moderate Democrats. The clear-sighted policies they espouse — addressing the immediate threats of climate change, gun violence and wildly expensive health care to name but a few — are deeply pragmatic necessities.
Furthermore, these policies are all wildly popular with voters on both sides of the ideological spectrum, and can be paid for with an adjustment of our national priorities. The F-35 Lightning II fighter aircraft is expected to cost at least $1.5 trillion before all is said and done. I can think of a few coastal cities which could use that money to stave off the ocean, which is coming, whether we like it or not. It’s either that, or the “conservatives” can try to bail the onrushing tides out of the boulevards with the alms bowls they usually fill with oil and coal dollars. The choice has become that stark.
It is time for the Blue Dogs and their media pals to get with the program and stop hiding behind meaningless labels and discredited tropes. The avalanche has begun, and the pebbles are taking the ride whether they like it or not. If they want to be on the right, they can try being on the right side of history, if there is anyone left to write it.
Tulsi Gabbard’s Financial Disclosures Leave Out Ties To Koch-Funded Think Tank
The Hawaii congresswoman, who’s running as a Democrat for president, sits on a foreign policy advisory council for the Catholic University of America.
By Nick Grube - honolulu civil beat
3/1/19
WASHINGTON — Here’s something you might not know about U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard: She’s an advisor to a Charles Koch-funded foreign policy think tank based at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
One of the reasons that’s a surprise is because it’s nowhere to be found on her latest financial disclosure form.
The revelation comes in a new report from Sludge, an investigative news site that tracks money in politics, that highlights the Koch connection to the university’s Center for the Study of Statesmanship. The center was founded in 2017 through a $2.35 million grant from the billionaire’s foundation.
Gabbard, who’s running for president in the Democratic primary, is one of a dozen advisors to the center with strong ties to the Charles and David Koch network — which the author calls “The Kochtopus.”
The billionaire brothers have used their wealth to reshape American politics by pushing far-right, libertarian policies through the use of campaign donations and dark money.
They also spent millions trying to infuse their ideas into institutions of higher learning, from Catholic University to Florida State and George Mason.
As the article points out, Gabbard’s affiliation with the Koch-funded Center for the Study of Statesmanship might seem odd given her public pronouncements about swearing off donations from political action committees and the need to overturn Citizens United.
But the center’s viewpoint also appears to align with Gabbard’s anti-interventionist viewpoints that revolve around keeping the U.S. out of regime-change wars.
“Gabbard, a military veteran, has often opposed U.S. engagement in overseas conflicts, including in war-torn Syria, so she is not out of place among anti-interventionists,” the article says.
“But for a Democrat — especially a 2016 Bernie Sanders surrogate who has progressive views on campaign finance reform and single-payer health care — to accept a position at a think tank funded by Koch and staffed with several Koch-linked individuals is unusual.”
Gabbard’s congressional spokeswoman Lauren McIlvaine defended her boss’ affiliation with the center in a statement to Sludge. McIlvaine also highlighted the fact that Gabbard is a member of the Hawaii Army National Guard and has served two tours of duty in the Middle East.
“The mission of CSS is aligned with the work that she has dedicated herself to, which is why she agreed to serve on their Council of Advisors,” McIlvaine said.
But it’s the financial disclosure omission that sticks out.
Gabbard’s financial disclosure from 2017 — which is the most recent one available — shows that the congresswoman held positions within three organizations: The Sanders Institute, the Healthy Hawaii Coalition and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum Profile in Courage Award Committee.
The congresswoman was on the advisory council in 2017.
According to the House Committee on Ethics financial disclosure guideline, members must report any positions they held with organizations, including educational institutions, regardless of whether they received compensation. The guidelines, however, do provide an exemption for honorary positions.
Civil Beat asked Gabbard’s office for an explanation as to why the congresswoman didn’t include the position on her 2017 financial disclosure, but did not receive a response.
This wouldn’t be the first time Gabbard has been caught for not filling out her forms correctly.
In January 2017, Gabbard and her husband, Abraham Williams, travelled to Lebanon and Syria as part of what she described as a secret “fact-finding” mission.
While in Syria she met with the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, a dictator who has been accused by both the U.S. and others in the international community of using chemical weapons against his own people.
The congresswoman was harshly rebuked when she returned by both the left and the right for meeting with Assad. She also initially refused to disclose who paid for her visit.
It was later revealed that Gabbard travelled to Syria with Dennis Kucinich, a former congressman from Ohio, and two brothers, Elie and Bassam Khawam, who said they funded the trip even though it was officially sponsored by the nonprofit, AACCESS-Ohio.
The Khawams have been described in various news articles as supporters of the Assad regime.
Gabbard did not initially disclose to the House Ethics Committee details of her trip to Syria, and after the controversy became public, amended her official travel disclosures. Amid the backlash, Gabbard also said she would reimburse all the costs of her visit.
Like Gabbard, Kucinich is also a member of the Center for the Study of Statesmanship Council of Advisors.
One of the reasons that’s a surprise is because it’s nowhere to be found on her latest financial disclosure form.
The revelation comes in a new report from Sludge, an investigative news site that tracks money in politics, that highlights the Koch connection to the university’s Center for the Study of Statesmanship. The center was founded in 2017 through a $2.35 million grant from the billionaire’s foundation.
Gabbard, who’s running for president in the Democratic primary, is one of a dozen advisors to the center with strong ties to the Charles and David Koch network — which the author calls “The Kochtopus.”
The billionaire brothers have used their wealth to reshape American politics by pushing far-right, libertarian policies through the use of campaign donations and dark money.
They also spent millions trying to infuse their ideas into institutions of higher learning, from Catholic University to Florida State and George Mason.
As the article points out, Gabbard’s affiliation with the Koch-funded Center for the Study of Statesmanship might seem odd given her public pronouncements about swearing off donations from political action committees and the need to overturn Citizens United.
But the center’s viewpoint also appears to align with Gabbard’s anti-interventionist viewpoints that revolve around keeping the U.S. out of regime-change wars.
“Gabbard, a military veteran, has often opposed U.S. engagement in overseas conflicts, including in war-torn Syria, so she is not out of place among anti-interventionists,” the article says.
“But for a Democrat — especially a 2016 Bernie Sanders surrogate who has progressive views on campaign finance reform and single-payer health care — to accept a position at a think tank funded by Koch and staffed with several Koch-linked individuals is unusual.”
Gabbard’s congressional spokeswoman Lauren McIlvaine defended her boss’ affiliation with the center in a statement to Sludge. McIlvaine also highlighted the fact that Gabbard is a member of the Hawaii Army National Guard and has served two tours of duty in the Middle East.
“The mission of CSS is aligned with the work that she has dedicated herself to, which is why she agreed to serve on their Council of Advisors,” McIlvaine said.
But it’s the financial disclosure omission that sticks out.
Gabbard’s financial disclosure from 2017 — which is the most recent one available — shows that the congresswoman held positions within three organizations: The Sanders Institute, the Healthy Hawaii Coalition and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum Profile in Courage Award Committee.
The congresswoman was on the advisory council in 2017.
According to the House Committee on Ethics financial disclosure guideline, members must report any positions they held with organizations, including educational institutions, regardless of whether they received compensation. The guidelines, however, do provide an exemption for honorary positions.
Civil Beat asked Gabbard’s office for an explanation as to why the congresswoman didn’t include the position on her 2017 financial disclosure, but did not receive a response.
This wouldn’t be the first time Gabbard has been caught for not filling out her forms correctly.
In January 2017, Gabbard and her husband, Abraham Williams, travelled to Lebanon and Syria as part of what she described as a secret “fact-finding” mission.
While in Syria she met with the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, a dictator who has been accused by both the U.S. and others in the international community of using chemical weapons against his own people.
The congresswoman was harshly rebuked when she returned by both the left and the right for meeting with Assad. She also initially refused to disclose who paid for her visit.
It was later revealed that Gabbard travelled to Syria with Dennis Kucinich, a former congressman from Ohio, and two brothers, Elie and Bassam Khawam, who said they funded the trip even though it was officially sponsored by the nonprofit, AACCESS-Ohio.
The Khawams have been described in various news articles as supporters of the Assad regime.
Gabbard did not initially disclose to the House Ethics Committee details of her trip to Syria, and after the controversy became public, amended her official travel disclosures. Amid the backlash, Gabbard also said she would reimburse all the costs of her visit.
Like Gabbard, Kucinich is also a member of the Center for the Study of Statesmanship Council of Advisors.
House Climate Panel Democrats Got Nearly $200,000 in Fossil Fuel Industry Donations
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi named nine Democrats to the new committee on Thursday.
PAUL BLUMENTHAL AND ALEXANDER C. KAUFMAN - mother jones
FEBRUARY 9, 2019 6:00 AM
The nine Democrats selected by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to serve on the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis received a combined $198,000 from fossil fuel industry political action committees in the 2018 election cycle.
The majority of the donations went to Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), who raised $117,000 from PACs connected to oil, gas, mining and electric utility corporations. Those donations constituted 6 percent of all contributions raised by Lujan. The rest of the appointees received scant funds from fossil fuel PACs. The data comes from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit that classifies campaign donations by industry.
Pelosi appointed the nine members to the committee on Thursday. Democrats created the select committee after winning control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 elections. It is tasked with coming up with policies to respond to man-made climate change.
Fundraising from the fossil fuel industry has been a flashpoint in the debate over the committee’s creation. Activists have pressed members to reject all fossil fuel money as a sign that they are independent from an industry that has worked hard to suppress climate science and deny any action to forestall disaster.
“That’s $200,000 of potential conflict of interest on an issue of grave concern,” said David Turnbull, a spokesman for the coalition of groups that oversee the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge. “If you’re going to be talking about the critical issue of climate change, you need to rid yourself of the influence of the fossil fuel industry.”
Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) was the only member named to the committee who has signed pledges promising not to raise money from corporate PACs or the fossil fuel industry. Prior to signing the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge, he did receive $1,500 from the National Association of Truck Stop Owners, a trade group that lobbies on behalf of highway gas stations for truckers.
Two members—freshman Reps. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.)—received just $1,000, the Center for Responsive Politics data showed. But a spokeswoman for Neguse said the congressman turned down that September donation from the South Dakota-based coal-fired utility Black Hills Corp. She said Neguse “will take the pledge.”
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), the select committee’s chairwoman, said in December she would consider taking the pledge, but Turnbull confirmed her office has not yet made any commitments. A Castor spokesman said she “will not accept contributions from the fossil fuel industry.” Last month, Castor divested shares of a mutual fund with fossil fuel utility holdings after the watchdog site Sludge reported she and her husband had up to $100,000 in investments in the fund.
Committee Democrats may not have raised huge sums from fossil fuel industry PACs, but a few of them have collected significant contributions from corporate donors. Lujan raised $1.1 million from business and industry PACs—more than half of all the money he raised in the 2018 election cycle. Reps. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), Julia Brownley (D-Calif.), Donald McEachin (D-Va.) and Castor all raised more than $300,000 apiece from corporate PACs in the last election.
“My values and voting record are clear,” Lujan said in a statement to HuffPost. “I’ve been battling climate change and advocating for the generation of renewable resources and energy efficiency since my time as the Chairman of the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission, before I was a Member of Congress. I respect and recognize New Mexico’s long history as an energy state, that is why, throughout my career, I have fought to ensure that New Mexico is a leader in our clean energy future.”
A spokeswoman for Bonamici said the “congresswoman generally does not sign pledges but has never taken money from big oil.”
The announcement Thursday of the panel’s additional members came just hours after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) released a resolution outlining the core pillars of a so-called Green New Deal, an unprecedented national plan to scale down greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade.
At a press conference announcing the resolution, Ocasio-Cortez said Pelosi invited her to join the select committee, but she turned it down.
“This is not a snub,” the congresswoman said, noting that three members of the panel were standing beside her at the event.
Late last year, Ocasio-Cortez launched an aggressive bid to replace the climate panel with a select committee on a Green New Deal. She garnered support from roughly 40 House Democrats. But Pelosi rejected the plan, tapping Castor in December to lead original select committee.
At the time, Castor declined to call for a rule barring members who accepted fossil fuel money from serving on the panel. Ocasio-Cortez panned the congresswoman in a tweet, comparing “loading a climate committee” with fossil fuel money to “letting foxes in the henhouse.”
“For young people, climate change is bigger than election or re-election,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “It’s life or death.”
The majority of the donations went to Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), who raised $117,000 from PACs connected to oil, gas, mining and electric utility corporations. Those donations constituted 6 percent of all contributions raised by Lujan. The rest of the appointees received scant funds from fossil fuel PACs. The data comes from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit that classifies campaign donations by industry.
Pelosi appointed the nine members to the committee on Thursday. Democrats created the select committee after winning control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 elections. It is tasked with coming up with policies to respond to man-made climate change.
Fundraising from the fossil fuel industry has been a flashpoint in the debate over the committee’s creation. Activists have pressed members to reject all fossil fuel money as a sign that they are independent from an industry that has worked hard to suppress climate science and deny any action to forestall disaster.
“That’s $200,000 of potential conflict of interest on an issue of grave concern,” said David Turnbull, a spokesman for the coalition of groups that oversee the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge. “If you’re going to be talking about the critical issue of climate change, you need to rid yourself of the influence of the fossil fuel industry.”
Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) was the only member named to the committee who has signed pledges promising not to raise money from corporate PACs or the fossil fuel industry. Prior to signing the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge, he did receive $1,500 from the National Association of Truck Stop Owners, a trade group that lobbies on behalf of highway gas stations for truckers.
Two members—freshman Reps. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.)—received just $1,000, the Center for Responsive Politics data showed. But a spokeswoman for Neguse said the congressman turned down that September donation from the South Dakota-based coal-fired utility Black Hills Corp. She said Neguse “will take the pledge.”
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), the select committee’s chairwoman, said in December she would consider taking the pledge, but Turnbull confirmed her office has not yet made any commitments. A Castor spokesman said she “will not accept contributions from the fossil fuel industry.” Last month, Castor divested shares of a mutual fund with fossil fuel utility holdings after the watchdog site Sludge reported she and her husband had up to $100,000 in investments in the fund.
Committee Democrats may not have raised huge sums from fossil fuel industry PACs, but a few of them have collected significant contributions from corporate donors. Lujan raised $1.1 million from business and industry PACs—more than half of all the money he raised in the 2018 election cycle. Reps. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), Julia Brownley (D-Calif.), Donald McEachin (D-Va.) and Castor all raised more than $300,000 apiece from corporate PACs in the last election.
“My values and voting record are clear,” Lujan said in a statement to HuffPost. “I’ve been battling climate change and advocating for the generation of renewable resources and energy efficiency since my time as the Chairman of the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission, before I was a Member of Congress. I respect and recognize New Mexico’s long history as an energy state, that is why, throughout my career, I have fought to ensure that New Mexico is a leader in our clean energy future.”
A spokeswoman for Bonamici said the “congresswoman generally does not sign pledges but has never taken money from big oil.”
The announcement Thursday of the panel’s additional members came just hours after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) released a resolution outlining the core pillars of a so-called Green New Deal, an unprecedented national plan to scale down greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade.
At a press conference announcing the resolution, Ocasio-Cortez said Pelosi invited her to join the select committee, but she turned it down.
“This is not a snub,” the congresswoman said, noting that three members of the panel were standing beside her at the event.
Late last year, Ocasio-Cortez launched an aggressive bid to replace the climate panel with a select committee on a Green New Deal. She garnered support from roughly 40 House Democrats. But Pelosi rejected the plan, tapping Castor in December to lead original select committee.
At the time, Castor declined to call for a rule barring members who accepted fossil fuel money from serving on the panel. Ocasio-Cortez panned the congresswoman in a tweet, comparing “loading a climate committee” with fossil fuel money to “letting foxes in the henhouse.”
“For young people, climate change is bigger than election or re-election,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “It’s life or death.”
Five congressional Democrats including Gabbard and Moulton likely to get primaried – From the left
David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement - raw story
30 JAN 2019 AT 09:47 ET
Progressive Democrats are wasting no time in cleaning house – in this case the House of Representatives – of members of their own party some think are too conservative or don’t represent the party well.
The Hill reports that among them is Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts. Congressman Moulton was once a rising star, when he was elected in 2014. But the 40-year old former Marine Corps decorated officer angered many with his multi-year war against then-former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Now that she has regained the gavel and won several major battles in a few short weeks against President Trump, Moulton is persona non grata to many in the Democratic Party
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is also in trouble. Her 2017 meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad raised eyebrows and drew the ire of Democrats and Republicans alike. More recently, her previous anti-LGBTQ activism has drawn anger and fire. And just this week news that her just-launched campaign for president is already disintegrating leaves her ripe for attack.
Conservative Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas also makes The Hill’s report. Cuellar has voted for anti-abortion legislation, voted to constitutionally define marriage as between one man and one woman only, and even campaigned for a Republican.
Another conservative Democrat, Rep. Dan Lipinski of Illinois, to some is a Democrat in name only. He is anti-LGBTQ. Lipinski in 2014 voted to reaffirm DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 that banned the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. The Supreme Court later struck down a key portion of the law.
Lipinski is also opposed to same-sex marriage, ObamaCare, the DREAM Act, and abortion rights. He was an original co-sponsor of the religious right’s First Amendment Defense Act (FADA), a bill that allows discrimination by people claiming their sincerely held religious views do not permit them to do business with LGBT people or same-sex couples.
Also making The Hill’s list is Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts. In Congress since 2001, Lynch is rated as a “a Populist-Leaning Liberal” by OnTheIssues, which tracks positions of all federal lawmakers and other politicians. Lynch opposed Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. The Hill reports video game developer Brianna Wu, who almost beat Lynch last year, will challenge him again in 2020.
RELATED: THE LIST: HERE ARE THE 16 HOUSE DEMOCRATS (INCLUDING 14 MEN) WHO SIGNED A LETTER OPPOSING PELOSI AS SPEAKER
The Hill reports that among them is Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts. Congressman Moulton was once a rising star, when he was elected in 2014. But the 40-year old former Marine Corps decorated officer angered many with his multi-year war against then-former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Now that she has regained the gavel and won several major battles in a few short weeks against President Trump, Moulton is persona non grata to many in the Democratic Party
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is also in trouble. Her 2017 meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad raised eyebrows and drew the ire of Democrats and Republicans alike. More recently, her previous anti-LGBTQ activism has drawn anger and fire. And just this week news that her just-launched campaign for president is already disintegrating leaves her ripe for attack.
Conservative Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas also makes The Hill’s report. Cuellar has voted for anti-abortion legislation, voted to constitutionally define marriage as between one man and one woman only, and even campaigned for a Republican.
Another conservative Democrat, Rep. Dan Lipinski of Illinois, to some is a Democrat in name only. He is anti-LGBTQ. Lipinski in 2014 voted to reaffirm DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 that banned the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. The Supreme Court later struck down a key portion of the law.
Lipinski is also opposed to same-sex marriage, ObamaCare, the DREAM Act, and abortion rights. He was an original co-sponsor of the religious right’s First Amendment Defense Act (FADA), a bill that allows discrimination by people claiming their sincerely held religious views do not permit them to do business with LGBT people or same-sex couples.
Also making The Hill’s list is Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts. In Congress since 2001, Lynch is rated as a “a Populist-Leaning Liberal” by OnTheIssues, which tracks positions of all federal lawmakers and other politicians. Lynch opposed Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. The Hill reports video game developer Brianna Wu, who almost beat Lynch last year, will challenge him again in 2020.
RELATED: THE LIST: HERE ARE THE 16 HOUSE DEMOCRATS (INCLUDING 14 MEN) WHO SIGNED A LETTER OPPOSING PELOSI AS SPEAKER
Joe Biden’s “Bipartisanship” Promotes Republican Agenda
BY
Sam Knight, Truthout
PUBLISHED
January 27, 2019
Joe Biden laughed off a New York Times report last week that described how he had praised a Republican lawmaker in a speech last year before midterm elections. The ex-Vice President made the remarks about the report on Thursday while speaking to a conference of mayors in Washington, DC.
“I read in The New York Times today that one of my problems, if I ever run for President — I like Republicans. Okay, well bless me father for I have sinned,” Biden said to laughter and applause.
“Where I come from, I don’t know how you get anything done unless you talk to one another again,” he added, praising bipartisanship for its own sake.
But the Times had not reported that Biden merely “likes Republicans,” or that he had worked with them to “get things done” in the past. The paper said Biden praised Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) in a speech to a conservative audience that personally netted him $200,000 in speaking fees.
The speech, before the Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan, also took place just weeks before midterms. Upton ended up defeating his Democratic opponent, Matt Longjohn, by 4.5 percentage points.
The Times noted that Republicans referenced Biden’s praise when branding Upton as being able to work with Democrats, and that local Democratic officials were incensed by Biden’s intervention.
Biden referenced his support for Upton while delivering his remarks last Thursday, though he didn’t note the sizable fee he received while offering the words of kindness.
“He was in a race, but I praised him about the fight against cancer,” Biden said. The ex-Vice President was referencing Upton’s support for legislation increasing funding for cancer research. “It mattered. It saved people’s lives,” Biden added.
What Biden didn’t mention is that Upton also voted in 2017 to repeal the Affordable Care Act. If the legislation had passed the Senate, it would have deprived 23 million people of health insurance, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. The loss of coverage would have likely led to thousands of more preventable deaths annually, according to an analysis by The Guardian.
Biden’s blithe reference to working with Republicans and “[getting] anything done” also glosses over his long history of backing extremely harmful pieces of legislation with broad support in Washington.
While he served in the Senate, Biden was instrumental in advancing draconian bipartisan initiatives to help fight the “War on Drugs.” Bills championed by Biden promoted civil asset forfeiture, harsher prison sentences for drug possession, increased mandatory minimums and decreased use of parole by state correctional institutions. His tenure as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee saw the acceleration in growth of an already burgeoning prison population in the United States. Mass incarceration is one of the things Biden “got done” with conservatives.
On economic issues, Biden also reached across the aisle to “get done” reforms that hollowed out working and middle-class American families. He was a supporter of Clinton-era welfare cuts backed by both sides, and among the Democrats who joined with Republicans to champion trade deals that have depressed wages and gutted regulations around the world, in the so-called “race to the bottom.”
Biden also backed bipartisan efforts to enable key business conglomerates to increase their stranglehold on America. He supported the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which relaxed limits on media ownership, leading to an increase in the corporatization and homogenization of journalism. Biden additionally backed the bipartisan repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that had previously segregated investment and retail banking. The move helped create numerous banks that were “too big to fail” after the 2008 financial crisis.
Though the ex-VP eventually said he regretted voting for the Glass-Steagall repeal, he hasn’t offered similar apologies for another bipartisan favor to the financial industry that he “got done”: the 2005 bankruptcy bill. The legislation, advanced with great support from Biden, has increased barriers to reducing consumer debt through bankruptcy. At the time the bill was drafted, the Delaware-based credit card firm MBNA had employed Biden’s son, Hunter, as a consultant.
Last, but far from least, Biden was among the Democrats who banded together with Republicans to authorize the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — yet another thing Biden helped the US “get done” that irreparably damaged countless lives.
Despite having his hand in multiple quagmires, Biden has viciously mocked the idea that the legacies he helped create have caused legitimate hardship among new generations of Americans.
“The younger generation now tells me how tough things are,” Biden said. “Give me a break. No, no, I have no empathy for it.”
“I read in The New York Times today that one of my problems, if I ever run for President — I like Republicans. Okay, well bless me father for I have sinned,” Biden said to laughter and applause.
“Where I come from, I don’t know how you get anything done unless you talk to one another again,” he added, praising bipartisanship for its own sake.
But the Times had not reported that Biden merely “likes Republicans,” or that he had worked with them to “get things done” in the past. The paper said Biden praised Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) in a speech to a conservative audience that personally netted him $200,000 in speaking fees.
The speech, before the Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan, also took place just weeks before midterms. Upton ended up defeating his Democratic opponent, Matt Longjohn, by 4.5 percentage points.
The Times noted that Republicans referenced Biden’s praise when branding Upton as being able to work with Democrats, and that local Democratic officials were incensed by Biden’s intervention.
Biden referenced his support for Upton while delivering his remarks last Thursday, though he didn’t note the sizable fee he received while offering the words of kindness.
“He was in a race, but I praised him about the fight against cancer,” Biden said. The ex-Vice President was referencing Upton’s support for legislation increasing funding for cancer research. “It mattered. It saved people’s lives,” Biden added.
What Biden didn’t mention is that Upton also voted in 2017 to repeal the Affordable Care Act. If the legislation had passed the Senate, it would have deprived 23 million people of health insurance, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. The loss of coverage would have likely led to thousands of more preventable deaths annually, according to an analysis by The Guardian.
Biden’s blithe reference to working with Republicans and “[getting] anything done” also glosses over his long history of backing extremely harmful pieces of legislation with broad support in Washington.
While he served in the Senate, Biden was instrumental in advancing draconian bipartisan initiatives to help fight the “War on Drugs.” Bills championed by Biden promoted civil asset forfeiture, harsher prison sentences for drug possession, increased mandatory minimums and decreased use of parole by state correctional institutions. His tenure as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee saw the acceleration in growth of an already burgeoning prison population in the United States. Mass incarceration is one of the things Biden “got done” with conservatives.
On economic issues, Biden also reached across the aisle to “get done” reforms that hollowed out working and middle-class American families. He was a supporter of Clinton-era welfare cuts backed by both sides, and among the Democrats who joined with Republicans to champion trade deals that have depressed wages and gutted regulations around the world, in the so-called “race to the bottom.”
Biden also backed bipartisan efforts to enable key business conglomerates to increase their stranglehold on America. He supported the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which relaxed limits on media ownership, leading to an increase in the corporatization and homogenization of journalism. Biden additionally backed the bipartisan repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that had previously segregated investment and retail banking. The move helped create numerous banks that were “too big to fail” after the 2008 financial crisis.
Though the ex-VP eventually said he regretted voting for the Glass-Steagall repeal, he hasn’t offered similar apologies for another bipartisan favor to the financial industry that he “got done”: the 2005 bankruptcy bill. The legislation, advanced with great support from Biden, has increased barriers to reducing consumer debt through bankruptcy. At the time the bill was drafted, the Delaware-based credit card firm MBNA had employed Biden’s son, Hunter, as a consultant.
Last, but far from least, Biden was among the Democrats who banded together with Republicans to authorize the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — yet another thing Biden helped the US “get done” that irreparably damaged countless lives.
Despite having his hand in multiple quagmires, Biden has viciously mocked the idea that the legacies he helped create have caused legitimate hardship among new generations of Americans.
“The younger generation now tells me how tough things are,” Biden said. “Give me a break. No, no, I have no empathy for it.”
A CORPORATE-FRIENDLY DEMOCRAT HAS BEEN STALLING PROGRESS FOR 40 YEARS. NOW A PRIMARY CHALLENGE MIGHT TAKE HIM OUT.
Akela Lacy - the intercept
January 26 2019, 5:56 a.m.
A NEW COURT-MANDATED redistricting in Virginia has put Democrats in a prime position to retake both chambers of the state legislature in November 2019 elections for the first time since 1995. But there could still be one major obstacle standing in the way of the party enacting a bottled-up progressive agenda: Democratic Senate Minority Leader Dick Saslaw, a 39-year incumbent with a corporate-friendly voting record and close ties to the state’s dominant power company. As long as Saslaw remains the party’s Senate boss, little can get done without his acquiescence. But for the first time since he was elected senator, he’s facing a primary challenge.
Saslaw has stymied progressive efforts to push an anti-corporate agenda in the state, voting against bills that would lead to substantive regulation of the state’s two electric monopolies, and speaking out against campaign finance reform and increased ethics and transparency regulations. Yasmine Taeb, an American-Muslim human rights lawyer who immigrated to the United States from Iran as a child, launched her primary challenge to Saslaw in September — and she’s going after his ties to Dominion Energy,
Virginia’s biggest private-industry political donor. The company gives heavily to both Democrats and Republicans, but Saslaw is its top recipient in the General Assembly and one of its biggest advocates in Richmond.
Taeb moved into the 35th District with the specific aim of unseating Saslaw, who has been in office longer than she’s been alive. Her first foray into politics was in 2014, when she made a bid for the Virginia House of Delegates and received fewer than 100 votes. She’s running on a platformthat includes a $15 minimum wage, no corporate PAC donations, and “Medicare for All.” But she’s also focused on stemming Dominion’s influence in the state, fighting to stop the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley pipelines.
“My opponent has not faced a primary challenger since 1979. As a result, he has become severely misaligned with the values of our district, the most liberal in the Commonwealth,” Taeb told The Intercept. “I want to be a state senator who actually represents our district — one who stands with our working families rather than union busting employers; one who will fight to end Dominion’s control over our legislators rather than serving it; and one who embodies the diversity of our district rather than slowing down racial justice efforts.”
Her opposition to Saslaw comes amid changes to state and local governments around the country. Democrats flipped more than 300 state House and Senate seats and six state legislative chambers last year. Seven states now have Democratic trifectas, meaning that the party controls the governorship and both chambers in the state legislature. Progressives are more likely to be able to pass policies like a higher minimum wage or eliminating cash bail on the state level than in Congress.
“There are increasingly two visions for Democratic politics in Virginia,” said Brennan Gilmore, executive director of Clean Virginia, a group advocating for stronger regulation of the state’s monopoly utilities and an end to two decades of manipulating legislation in their favor. “There’s the old-school Virginia Way, corporate friendly, pay to play, and then a new wave of legislators — many freshmen from last year, but a number of longtime incumbents as well — who are running on transparency and independence, putting constituent interests above special interests.”
The new lawmakers are not taking Dominion money, Gilmore said. “As the worst paragon of that old system of corporate cronyism, Dominion has become the key signal of a much broader push against the status quo. And no one represents the old school — or has done Dominion’s bidding — as much as Dick Saslaw.”
Virginia Democrats are angling to win control of the state legislature in 2019, and Saslaw’s re-election would make him the likely majority leader. A Democratic majority would make passing progressive legislationpossible, but activists in the state worry that Saslaw, who has arguedagainst proposals to strengthen campaign finance and ethics laws, would get in the way of that. Taeb is hoping that she can mobilize voters in their increasingly progressive district — which Saslaw helped redraw in 2011 — against him by highlighting his cozy, mutually beneficial relationship with Dominion ahead of the June 11 primary election.
DOMINION IS KNOWN for helping to write legislation in its favor. The Richmond Times-Dispatch in 2017 ran a four-part series that found Dominion exerting significant influence to gradually gut the power of the State Corporation Commission, the regulatory agency tasked with overseeing the company’s dealings. The assembly last year passed a billthat further weakened the SCC’s ratepayer protections.
Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has described the relationship between the state legislature and the utility as “cronyism.”
“Dominion Energy is the strongest lobbying entity in Virginia, and that’s very evident in the fact that we’ve, for several years now, had legislation that further hurt ratepayers,” Delegate Sam Rasoul told The Intercept. “Objectively now, even Dominion agrees that it has overcharged ratepayers.”
Saslaw has consistently opposed bills pushing energy and spending efficiency, introducing and supporting Dominion-advised bills to allow the public utility to double-charge consumers and keep the excess profits, freeze electricity rates, and keep the SCC from regularly reviewing those rates. Saslaw is also known, according to a Democratic state legislator who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity given his relationship with the senator, for reprimanding individual members of the assembly for trying to amend Dominion-sponsored bills. According to local activist and Fairfax County Democratic Committee Member Stephen Spitz, who is volunteering with Taeb’s campaign, Saslaw is famous for scolding his colleagues for trying to rein in the company and going on unsolicited tangents singing its praises. Dominion, in turn, contacts Saslaw when it’s in trouble.
Saslaw’s campaign has raised just shy of $600,000 this cycle, including $22,500 from the Dominion Employees PAC, formerly known as Dominion Energy PAC. He’s also accepted donations from PACs associated with the weapons manufacturer, Raytheon, and controversial car-title lenders, which he’s been bashed for supporting. Taeb’s campaign, meanwhile, has raised just over $70,000. Fifty-thousand dollars of that came from Sonjia Smith, a longtime area Democratic donor who is married to Michael D. Bills, a billionaire investor who started an initiative to support candidates who refused to take money from Dominion.
The incumbent’s campaign manager, Andrew Whitley, said Saslaw respects candidates who have sworn off Dominion money, but he will continue to take money from the utility. “As the leader of the caucus, his main goal in 2019 is to take back the majority,” Whitley told The Intercept. “And of course, making that happen means that making sure that our campaigns have the resources to be successful. So yes, he does take contributions from Dominion, and he takes them with the goal of making Virginia more progressive and helping us take back the Senate.”
Whitley said that Saslaw’s voting record, and his endorsements by the League of Conservation Voters and advocates for solar, disprove the notion that Dominion’s donations have bought influence. “The senator has voted on initiatives that have been against Dominion’s influence,” Whitley said. He did not specify what initiatives those were.
Virginia is one of only six states that allow unlimited corporate contributions to state campaigns. Republicans Sen. Frank Wagner and Delegate Terry Kilgore are other lawmakers who have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the utility giant while in office. Wagner in 2015 sponsored a controversial rate-freeze bill, which he authored and passed with help from Dominion, that locked in rates for the utility and allowed it to overcharge consumers by estimates of up to $425 million.
Following public outcry over that legislation, Saslaw and Wagner co-sponsored another bill last year that they said was meant to right the wrongs of the rate-freeze bill. Democratic Attorney General Mark Herring publicly denounced that bipartisan, pro-Dominion bill for double-charging clients and installing inadequate consumer protections. The state Senate killed another bill introduced by Democratic Sen. Chap Petersen that would have more abruptly lifted the rate freeze and pursued the Wagner-Saslaw measure, which was more favorable to utilities instead. It was eventually approved and signed into law last March.
This year, Rasoul and Rep. Alfonso H. Lopez are co-sponsoring an omnibus bill that would reinstate biannual reviews of Dominion rates by the SCC and increase the amount of over-earnings the company must refund to consumers. It is unclear whether the bill will have enough support to pass.
“It’ll be difficult for it to pass as it comes through the powerful Commerce and Labor committee,” Rasoul said. But, he said, pledges by Democratic candidates, as well as the attorney general and the lieutenant governor, not to take money from Dominion are a good sign. “The bar has definitely been elevated, that you need to be on the right side of this in order to be a candidate.”
Some Democrats think it’s important to balance skepticism of corporate donations with the risk of losing elections. “If we were not to take money, and Republicans still take money, and Democrats lose, there’s a part of me that would regret seeing that,” said Peg Winningham, chair of the Falls Church Democratic Committee. “But I absolutely think that Virginia should have a lot stricter controls on campaign donations.”
IN ADDITION TO his ties to Dominion, Saslaw’s critics have also turned their attention to the senator’s past comments that, they say, show he is out of step with an increasingly diverse Democratic Party.
In September, Saslaw was at George Mason University for a senatorial debate between Tim Kaine and Corey Stuart. In a conversation with a group of people at that event, Saslaw suggested that voters in the 38th District would not vote for Taeb given that his district is majority white, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation.
Saslaw said Taeb “‘can’t win in a district like this,’ and then he went off spouting all these facts about his district,” said one person who was there, requesting anonymity because of their relationship with the senator. Saslaw pointed out that the district is “60 percent white, it was some percentage of older Virginians, it was some percentage of Christians,” the source said. “Basically the message I interpreted was that someone like Yasmine, who’s a diverse candidate and a young candidate, couldn’t win in the district.”
Taeb
Whitley, Saslaw’s spokesperson, said the conversation could not have happened because Saslaw didn’t have time to speak to people on the margins of the debate, dismissing it as a “he-said-she-said” scenario.
Saslaw has previously been accused of being skeptical that a Muslim candidate could win. When Atif Qarni, now Virginia’s secretary of education, was running for the Virginia House of Delegates in 2015, he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that state Democrats warned him not to proceed with his campaign because, as a Muslim, he couldn’t win. Responding to a Facebook post criticizing the article, Qarni named Saslaw in relation to the challenges he faced securing funding as a Muslim candidate. “There was bias in this race. Religion was brought up,” Qarni wrote in a comment. “I brought up these concerns with several people–including some people you know well, but the typical response, was ‘this is politics’. People are too afraid to stand up to people like Dick Saslaw.”
In a 2015 meeting of the Mason District Democratic Committee, Saslaw opposed a proposal to change the name of the Jeb Stuart High School, which was named after a Confederate army general. He described the name-change effort as being overly politically correct and suggested that it would lead to a slippery slope, with calls to change the name of Virginia schools and landmarks named after Confederate leaders, according to Spitz; David Jonas, a Mason District Democrat; Sean Barnett, a Fairfax County Democrat; and two local Democrats who asked for anonymity given their working relationship with the senator, who were all at the meeting. (Barnett has endorsed Taeb for state senator.)
Though Saslaw originally opposed changing the name of Stuart High, he appeared this year at a fundraiser supporting the school board’s move. He also donated to the private fundraising efforts to support the change. The school is now called Justice High School.
Jessica Swanson, a Mason District Democrat, told The Intercept that she is extremely grateful for the senator’s $1,500 contribution to the name-change effort. She was at the 2015 meeting and said she doesn’t remember what, if anything, Saslaw said about it at the time.
Three years earlier, Saslaw had cut his sponsorship of the Fairfax County Democratic Committee’s annual dinner, after members changed the event’s name from the Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinner — after the slave-owning presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson — to instead honor Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, according to Spitz and another person familiar with the matter. In 2014, the name of the dinner was changed back to Jefferson-Jackson, and Saslaw resumed his support.
Willingham, chair of the Falls Church Democratic Committee who has worked with Saslaw, said she’s “never heard him say a bigoted word.” She knows Taeb as well and hasn’t endorsed either candidate.
In response to questions about Saslaw’s comments on Taeb and the school’s name change, Whitley said talking about these claims does a disservice to both candidates. “We also do a disservice to the constituents and to the party in general by having this kind of conversation,” he said.
Saslaw has stymied progressive efforts to push an anti-corporate agenda in the state, voting against bills that would lead to substantive regulation of the state’s two electric monopolies, and speaking out against campaign finance reform and increased ethics and transparency regulations. Yasmine Taeb, an American-Muslim human rights lawyer who immigrated to the United States from Iran as a child, launched her primary challenge to Saslaw in September — and she’s going after his ties to Dominion Energy,
Virginia’s biggest private-industry political donor. The company gives heavily to both Democrats and Republicans, but Saslaw is its top recipient in the General Assembly and one of its biggest advocates in Richmond.
Taeb moved into the 35th District with the specific aim of unseating Saslaw, who has been in office longer than she’s been alive. Her first foray into politics was in 2014, when she made a bid for the Virginia House of Delegates and received fewer than 100 votes. She’s running on a platformthat includes a $15 minimum wage, no corporate PAC donations, and “Medicare for All.” But she’s also focused on stemming Dominion’s influence in the state, fighting to stop the Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley pipelines.
“My opponent has not faced a primary challenger since 1979. As a result, he has become severely misaligned with the values of our district, the most liberal in the Commonwealth,” Taeb told The Intercept. “I want to be a state senator who actually represents our district — one who stands with our working families rather than union busting employers; one who will fight to end Dominion’s control over our legislators rather than serving it; and one who embodies the diversity of our district rather than slowing down racial justice efforts.”
Her opposition to Saslaw comes amid changes to state and local governments around the country. Democrats flipped more than 300 state House and Senate seats and six state legislative chambers last year. Seven states now have Democratic trifectas, meaning that the party controls the governorship and both chambers in the state legislature. Progressives are more likely to be able to pass policies like a higher minimum wage or eliminating cash bail on the state level than in Congress.
“There are increasingly two visions for Democratic politics in Virginia,” said Brennan Gilmore, executive director of Clean Virginia, a group advocating for stronger regulation of the state’s monopoly utilities and an end to two decades of manipulating legislation in their favor. “There’s the old-school Virginia Way, corporate friendly, pay to play, and then a new wave of legislators — many freshmen from last year, but a number of longtime incumbents as well — who are running on transparency and independence, putting constituent interests above special interests.”
The new lawmakers are not taking Dominion money, Gilmore said. “As the worst paragon of that old system of corporate cronyism, Dominion has become the key signal of a much broader push against the status quo. And no one represents the old school — or has done Dominion’s bidding — as much as Dick Saslaw.”
Virginia Democrats are angling to win control of the state legislature in 2019, and Saslaw’s re-election would make him the likely majority leader. A Democratic majority would make passing progressive legislationpossible, but activists in the state worry that Saslaw, who has arguedagainst proposals to strengthen campaign finance and ethics laws, would get in the way of that. Taeb is hoping that she can mobilize voters in their increasingly progressive district — which Saslaw helped redraw in 2011 — against him by highlighting his cozy, mutually beneficial relationship with Dominion ahead of the June 11 primary election.
DOMINION IS KNOWN for helping to write legislation in its favor. The Richmond Times-Dispatch in 2017 ran a four-part series that found Dominion exerting significant influence to gradually gut the power of the State Corporation Commission, the regulatory agency tasked with overseeing the company’s dealings. The assembly last year passed a billthat further weakened the SCC’s ratepayer protections.
Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has described the relationship between the state legislature and the utility as “cronyism.”
“Dominion Energy is the strongest lobbying entity in Virginia, and that’s very evident in the fact that we’ve, for several years now, had legislation that further hurt ratepayers,” Delegate Sam Rasoul told The Intercept. “Objectively now, even Dominion agrees that it has overcharged ratepayers.”
Saslaw has consistently opposed bills pushing energy and spending efficiency, introducing and supporting Dominion-advised bills to allow the public utility to double-charge consumers and keep the excess profits, freeze electricity rates, and keep the SCC from regularly reviewing those rates. Saslaw is also known, according to a Democratic state legislator who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity given his relationship with the senator, for reprimanding individual members of the assembly for trying to amend Dominion-sponsored bills. According to local activist and Fairfax County Democratic Committee Member Stephen Spitz, who is volunteering with Taeb’s campaign, Saslaw is famous for scolding his colleagues for trying to rein in the company and going on unsolicited tangents singing its praises. Dominion, in turn, contacts Saslaw when it’s in trouble.
Saslaw’s campaign has raised just shy of $600,000 this cycle, including $22,500 from the Dominion Employees PAC, formerly known as Dominion Energy PAC. He’s also accepted donations from PACs associated with the weapons manufacturer, Raytheon, and controversial car-title lenders, which he’s been bashed for supporting. Taeb’s campaign, meanwhile, has raised just over $70,000. Fifty-thousand dollars of that came from Sonjia Smith, a longtime area Democratic donor who is married to Michael D. Bills, a billionaire investor who started an initiative to support candidates who refused to take money from Dominion.
The incumbent’s campaign manager, Andrew Whitley, said Saslaw respects candidates who have sworn off Dominion money, but he will continue to take money from the utility. “As the leader of the caucus, his main goal in 2019 is to take back the majority,” Whitley told The Intercept. “And of course, making that happen means that making sure that our campaigns have the resources to be successful. So yes, he does take contributions from Dominion, and he takes them with the goal of making Virginia more progressive and helping us take back the Senate.”
Whitley said that Saslaw’s voting record, and his endorsements by the League of Conservation Voters and advocates for solar, disprove the notion that Dominion’s donations have bought influence. “The senator has voted on initiatives that have been against Dominion’s influence,” Whitley said. He did not specify what initiatives those were.
Virginia is one of only six states that allow unlimited corporate contributions to state campaigns. Republicans Sen. Frank Wagner and Delegate Terry Kilgore are other lawmakers who have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the utility giant while in office. Wagner in 2015 sponsored a controversial rate-freeze bill, which he authored and passed with help from Dominion, that locked in rates for the utility and allowed it to overcharge consumers by estimates of up to $425 million.
Following public outcry over that legislation, Saslaw and Wagner co-sponsored another bill last year that they said was meant to right the wrongs of the rate-freeze bill. Democratic Attorney General Mark Herring publicly denounced that bipartisan, pro-Dominion bill for double-charging clients and installing inadequate consumer protections. The state Senate killed another bill introduced by Democratic Sen. Chap Petersen that would have more abruptly lifted the rate freeze and pursued the Wagner-Saslaw measure, which was more favorable to utilities instead. It was eventually approved and signed into law last March.
This year, Rasoul and Rep. Alfonso H. Lopez are co-sponsoring an omnibus bill that would reinstate biannual reviews of Dominion rates by the SCC and increase the amount of over-earnings the company must refund to consumers. It is unclear whether the bill will have enough support to pass.
“It’ll be difficult for it to pass as it comes through the powerful Commerce and Labor committee,” Rasoul said. But, he said, pledges by Democratic candidates, as well as the attorney general and the lieutenant governor, not to take money from Dominion are a good sign. “The bar has definitely been elevated, that you need to be on the right side of this in order to be a candidate.”
Some Democrats think it’s important to balance skepticism of corporate donations with the risk of losing elections. “If we were not to take money, and Republicans still take money, and Democrats lose, there’s a part of me that would regret seeing that,” said Peg Winningham, chair of the Falls Church Democratic Committee. “But I absolutely think that Virginia should have a lot stricter controls on campaign donations.”
IN ADDITION TO his ties to Dominion, Saslaw’s critics have also turned their attention to the senator’s past comments that, they say, show he is out of step with an increasingly diverse Democratic Party.
In September, Saslaw was at George Mason University for a senatorial debate between Tim Kaine and Corey Stuart. In a conversation with a group of people at that event, Saslaw suggested that voters in the 38th District would not vote for Taeb given that his district is majority white, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation.
Saslaw said Taeb “‘can’t win in a district like this,’ and then he went off spouting all these facts about his district,” said one person who was there, requesting anonymity because of their relationship with the senator. Saslaw pointed out that the district is “60 percent white, it was some percentage of older Virginians, it was some percentage of Christians,” the source said. “Basically the message I interpreted was that someone like Yasmine, who’s a diverse candidate and a young candidate, couldn’t win in the district.”
Taeb
Whitley, Saslaw’s spokesperson, said the conversation could not have happened because Saslaw didn’t have time to speak to people on the margins of the debate, dismissing it as a “he-said-she-said” scenario.
Saslaw has previously been accused of being skeptical that a Muslim candidate could win. When Atif Qarni, now Virginia’s secretary of education, was running for the Virginia House of Delegates in 2015, he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that state Democrats warned him not to proceed with his campaign because, as a Muslim, he couldn’t win. Responding to a Facebook post criticizing the article, Qarni named Saslaw in relation to the challenges he faced securing funding as a Muslim candidate. “There was bias in this race. Religion was brought up,” Qarni wrote in a comment. “I brought up these concerns with several people–including some people you know well, but the typical response, was ‘this is politics’. People are too afraid to stand up to people like Dick Saslaw.”
In a 2015 meeting of the Mason District Democratic Committee, Saslaw opposed a proposal to change the name of the Jeb Stuart High School, which was named after a Confederate army general. He described the name-change effort as being overly politically correct and suggested that it would lead to a slippery slope, with calls to change the name of Virginia schools and landmarks named after Confederate leaders, according to Spitz; David Jonas, a Mason District Democrat; Sean Barnett, a Fairfax County Democrat; and two local Democrats who asked for anonymity given their working relationship with the senator, who were all at the meeting. (Barnett has endorsed Taeb for state senator.)
Though Saslaw originally opposed changing the name of Stuart High, he appeared this year at a fundraiser supporting the school board’s move. He also donated to the private fundraising efforts to support the change. The school is now called Justice High School.
Jessica Swanson, a Mason District Democrat, told The Intercept that she is extremely grateful for the senator’s $1,500 contribution to the name-change effort. She was at the 2015 meeting and said she doesn’t remember what, if anything, Saslaw said about it at the time.
Three years earlier, Saslaw had cut his sponsorship of the Fairfax County Democratic Committee’s annual dinner, after members changed the event’s name from the Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinner — after the slave-owning presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson — to instead honor Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, according to Spitz and another person familiar with the matter. In 2014, the name of the dinner was changed back to Jefferson-Jackson, and Saslaw resumed his support.
Willingham, chair of the Falls Church Democratic Committee who has worked with Saslaw, said she’s “never heard him say a bigoted word.” She knows Taeb as well and hasn’t endorsed either candidate.
In response to questions about Saslaw’s comments on Taeb and the school’s name change, Whitley said talking about these claims does a disservice to both candidates. “We also do a disservice to the constituents and to the party in general by having this kind of conversation,” he said.
another fraud!!!
Kirsten Gillibrand is looking toward the future. Is she ready to face her past?
Gillibrand's past stances on immigration and guns -- as well as her work with big tobacco -- are likely to come back to haunt her as she jumps into the 2020 race.
ADDY BAIRD - thinkprogress
JAN 16, 2019, 1:32 PM
During a Tuesday night appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) announced that she is officially running for president, joining what looks to be a crowded field of Democratic contenders.
“I’m going to run for president of the United States, because as a young mom, I’m going to fight for other people’s kids as hard as I would fight for my own,” Gillibrand said. “Which is why I believe that health care should be a right and not a privilege. It’s why I believe we should have better public schools for our kids, because it shouldn’t matter what block you grow up on. And I believe that anybody who wants to work hard enough should be able to get whatever job training they need to earn their way into the middle class.”
To accomplish any of those things, Gillibrand said Tuesday, you have to take on the “systems of power,” including institutional racism, corruption and greed in Washington, and special interests.
“I know that I have the compassion, the courage, and fearless determination to get that done,” she added.
Gillibrand’s 2020 strategy seems clear: Lay out a clear vision for a progressive future, and keep your fingerprints off anything Trump touches. Nevertheless, the Gillibrand who’ll soon be headed to Iowa for the pre-primary presidential campaign rituals is nearly unrecognizable from the Gillibrand who was first elected to the House more than a decade ago. As the 2020 field continues to grow, the one-time Blue Dog Democrat who was once best known for representing a conservative upstate district is inevitably going to have to square this past with her newly-fashioned, “progressive presidential contender” brand.
Since President Donald Trump took office two years ago, Gillibrand has voted with him just 11.9 percent of the time, less often than any other Senate Democrat (though only about one percent less often than Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who also recently announced her bid for the White House). Gillibrand also attracted attention in the early months of Trump’s tenure for opposing his nominees more often than any other senator, and, impressively, she alienated some tragically shortsighted bigwigs in the Democratic donor caste when she led the charge to force former Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) out of the upper chamber following sexual harassment allegations.
She supports Medicare for All, joining a long list of progressive co-sponsors of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) bill, and she has called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Reform (ICE), joining a much shorter list of leftist candidates who took up the issue during the midterms.
“I don’t think ICE today is working as intended. … I believe that it has become a deportation force, and I think you should separate the criminal justice from the immigration issues,” Gillibrand said last summer. “I think you should reimagine ICE under a new agency with a very different mission and take those two missions out.”
But this position stands in stark contrast to the ones she proudly touted during her tenure as the representative of New York’s 20th District in the U.S. House. When Gillibrand first took office in 2007, she quickly joined the conservative Democratic Blue Dog coalition and made her name supporting a slew of immigration priorities that would make Trump proud.
“In Congress, Congresswoman Gillibrand has been a firm opponent of any proposal that would give amnesty to illegal aliens,” the issues page of her House website read. “The federal government must provide the necessary resources to secure our borders, which is critical for America’s economic and national security. She strongly supports legislation that would significantly increase the number of border patrol agents and place sophisticated technology along the Southern border to catch human and drug smugglers.”
Gillibrand authored and passed an amendment that “will prevent employers who have hired illegal aliens from receiving federal contracts,” the site touted.
It continued, “In addition, Congresswoman Gillibrand believes English should be made the official language of the United States and she opposes providing non-emergency taxpayer benefits to illegal aliens.”
While in the House, Gillibrand also co-sponsored the “Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act of 2007,” a bill that a later New York Times editorialdescribed as being “all about border fencing and requiring everyone in America to prove legal status before being allowed to work.”
And at one point, as Slate noted in 2017, the Human Rights Campaign bestowed on Gillibrand the dubious distinction of having the lowest rating of any New York Democrat in the 110th Congress for her position on LGBTQ rights. On this matter, however, she quickly evolved to emerge as a relatively early proponent of same-sex marriage in the Democratic party, beating current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and the woman whose Senate seat she would later fill, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to supporting the issue. That said, a skeptical New York Times editorial board suggested in 2009 that her embrace of the issue was largely due to the fact that former New York Gov. David Paterson, who appointed her to the Senate following Clinton’s departure, was an early and strong supporter of gay marriage.
That same editorial, published not long after Gillibrand was appointed to Clinton’s seat, raised questions about Gillibrand’s history with guns: When she was appointed to the Senate, Gillibrand — who often touted the fact that she slept with two guns under her bed — held a perfect grade from the National Rifle Association.
“If I want to protect my family, if I want to have a weapon in the home, that should be my right,” she said in 2010. Gillibrand quickly fell out of the NRA’s favor and was downgraded to an F before the year’s end, an early sign of her coming reconstruction.
Nevertheless, as recently as 2014, Gillibrand still teamed up with Republicans — in this case to push a resolution condemning Hamas. That summer, more than 1,800 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in just a single month.
Gillibrand’s work before holding elected office is also worth examining. As a young lawyer in the 1990’s, she represented big tobacco, helping the Philip Morris Company fight a federal perjury investigation as the Justice Department was trying to prove that industry executives had lied about the dangers of smoking.
In the years since, she and her team have downplayed her involvement in the case, saying it is just a “small part” of her legal career and that she “worked for the clients assigned to her.” She has argued that the lucrative work allowed her to take on pro bono cases defending women and children and tenants in unsafe conditions.
In a 60 Minutes interview last February, Gillibrand addressed her past more bluntly than ever before.
On guns, she said, “After I got appointed, I went down to Brooklyn to meet with families who had suffered from gun violence in their communities, and you immediately experience the feeling that I couldn’t have been more wrong—you know I only had the lens of upstate New York.”
On immigration: “I came from a district that was 98 percent white. … And I just didn’t take the time to understand why these issues mattered because it wasn’t right in front of me. And that was my fault. It was something that I’m embarrassed about and I’m ashamed of.”
But Gillibrand was hardly restricted to “the lens of upstate New York.” She had, as 60 minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi noted, lived downstate in New York City, for more than a decade before representing her upstate district. While it’s refreshing to hear any politician admit being embarrassed or ashamed about their past, it’s likely not going to be a good enough answer when Gillibrand’s history inevitably comes under renewed fire.
“I’m going to run for president of the United States, because as a young mom, I’m going to fight for other people’s kids as hard as I would fight for my own,” Gillibrand said. “Which is why I believe that health care should be a right and not a privilege. It’s why I believe we should have better public schools for our kids, because it shouldn’t matter what block you grow up on. And I believe that anybody who wants to work hard enough should be able to get whatever job training they need to earn their way into the middle class.”
To accomplish any of those things, Gillibrand said Tuesday, you have to take on the “systems of power,” including institutional racism, corruption and greed in Washington, and special interests.
“I know that I have the compassion, the courage, and fearless determination to get that done,” she added.
Gillibrand’s 2020 strategy seems clear: Lay out a clear vision for a progressive future, and keep your fingerprints off anything Trump touches. Nevertheless, the Gillibrand who’ll soon be headed to Iowa for the pre-primary presidential campaign rituals is nearly unrecognizable from the Gillibrand who was first elected to the House more than a decade ago. As the 2020 field continues to grow, the one-time Blue Dog Democrat who was once best known for representing a conservative upstate district is inevitably going to have to square this past with her newly-fashioned, “progressive presidential contender” brand.
Since President Donald Trump took office two years ago, Gillibrand has voted with him just 11.9 percent of the time, less often than any other Senate Democrat (though only about one percent less often than Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who also recently announced her bid for the White House). Gillibrand also attracted attention in the early months of Trump’s tenure for opposing his nominees more often than any other senator, and, impressively, she alienated some tragically shortsighted bigwigs in the Democratic donor caste when she led the charge to force former Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) out of the upper chamber following sexual harassment allegations.
She supports Medicare for All, joining a long list of progressive co-sponsors of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) bill, and she has called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Reform (ICE), joining a much shorter list of leftist candidates who took up the issue during the midterms.
“I don’t think ICE today is working as intended. … I believe that it has become a deportation force, and I think you should separate the criminal justice from the immigration issues,” Gillibrand said last summer. “I think you should reimagine ICE under a new agency with a very different mission and take those two missions out.”
But this position stands in stark contrast to the ones she proudly touted during her tenure as the representative of New York’s 20th District in the U.S. House. When Gillibrand first took office in 2007, she quickly joined the conservative Democratic Blue Dog coalition and made her name supporting a slew of immigration priorities that would make Trump proud.
“In Congress, Congresswoman Gillibrand has been a firm opponent of any proposal that would give amnesty to illegal aliens,” the issues page of her House website read. “The federal government must provide the necessary resources to secure our borders, which is critical for America’s economic and national security. She strongly supports legislation that would significantly increase the number of border patrol agents and place sophisticated technology along the Southern border to catch human and drug smugglers.”
Gillibrand authored and passed an amendment that “will prevent employers who have hired illegal aliens from receiving federal contracts,” the site touted.
It continued, “In addition, Congresswoman Gillibrand believes English should be made the official language of the United States and she opposes providing non-emergency taxpayer benefits to illegal aliens.”
While in the House, Gillibrand also co-sponsored the “Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act of 2007,” a bill that a later New York Times editorialdescribed as being “all about border fencing and requiring everyone in America to prove legal status before being allowed to work.”
And at one point, as Slate noted in 2017, the Human Rights Campaign bestowed on Gillibrand the dubious distinction of having the lowest rating of any New York Democrat in the 110th Congress for her position on LGBTQ rights. On this matter, however, she quickly evolved to emerge as a relatively early proponent of same-sex marriage in the Democratic party, beating current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and the woman whose Senate seat she would later fill, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to supporting the issue. That said, a skeptical New York Times editorial board suggested in 2009 that her embrace of the issue was largely due to the fact that former New York Gov. David Paterson, who appointed her to the Senate following Clinton’s departure, was an early and strong supporter of gay marriage.
That same editorial, published not long after Gillibrand was appointed to Clinton’s seat, raised questions about Gillibrand’s history with guns: When she was appointed to the Senate, Gillibrand — who often touted the fact that she slept with two guns under her bed — held a perfect grade from the National Rifle Association.
“If I want to protect my family, if I want to have a weapon in the home, that should be my right,” she said in 2010. Gillibrand quickly fell out of the NRA’s favor and was downgraded to an F before the year’s end, an early sign of her coming reconstruction.
Nevertheless, as recently as 2014, Gillibrand still teamed up with Republicans — in this case to push a resolution condemning Hamas. That summer, more than 1,800 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in just a single month.
Gillibrand’s work before holding elected office is also worth examining. As a young lawyer in the 1990’s, she represented big tobacco, helping the Philip Morris Company fight a federal perjury investigation as the Justice Department was trying to prove that industry executives had lied about the dangers of smoking.
In the years since, she and her team have downplayed her involvement in the case, saying it is just a “small part” of her legal career and that she “worked for the clients assigned to her.” She has argued that the lucrative work allowed her to take on pro bono cases defending women and children and tenants in unsafe conditions.
In a 60 Minutes interview last February, Gillibrand addressed her past more bluntly than ever before.
On guns, she said, “After I got appointed, I went down to Brooklyn to meet with families who had suffered from gun violence in their communities, and you immediately experience the feeling that I couldn’t have been more wrong—you know I only had the lens of upstate New York.”
On immigration: “I came from a district that was 98 percent white. … And I just didn’t take the time to understand why these issues mattered because it wasn’t right in front of me. And that was my fault. It was something that I’m embarrassed about and I’m ashamed of.”
But Gillibrand was hardly restricted to “the lens of upstate New York.” She had, as 60 minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi noted, lived downstate in New York City, for more than a decade before representing her upstate district. While it’s refreshing to hear any politician admit being embarrassed or ashamed about their past, it’s likely not going to be a good enough answer when Gillibrand’s history inevitably comes under renewed fire.
demo governor sells out people who elected him!!!
Virginia State Board Approves Permit for Pipeline Station In Historic African-American Community
By Associated Press - atlanta black star
January 10, 2019
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A state board in Virginia approved a contentious plan Tuesday to build a natural gas pipeline station in a historic African-American community, prompting angry shouts of “shame” from more than 200 opponents.
The State Air Pollution Control Board voted 4-0 in favor of a key permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would run 600 miles (965 kilometers) and carry fracked natural gas from West Virginia into Virginia and North Carolina.
Some opponents of the project hissed, coughed and shouted during the meeting. Fifteen people were removed by state police, and one woman was charged with trespassing after she laid down on the floor and refused to comply with police verbal commands to leave.
The proposed site for the compressor station is in Union Hill, an unincorporated community founded by freed slaves. The community is in rural Buckingham County, about an hour’s drive west of Richmond.
Opponents are concerned that exhaust from the 54,000-horsepower compressor station would hurt low-income and elderly residents living nearby. Supporters say it will boost development.
The station would be built on 15 acres (6 hectares) of a 70-acre (28-hectare) site, and the rest of the property left undisturbed, according to Dominion Energy, the pipeline’s lead developer. Compressor stations are used to power interstate natural gas pipelines, moving gas through the system.
Paul Wilson, pastor of two Baptist churches near the proposed site, said opponents will keep fighting. He didn’t elaborate on whether they would take legal action.
“We’re looking at all of our avenues,” he said after the vote. “It’s a long way from over. I think Dominion wants to wear people down. But that’s not going to happen.”
Dominion spokesman Karl Neddenien acknowledged in a statement after the vote that it will “have to continue building trust in the community.” He said the project’s backers are making investments in a new community center and rescue squad “but it will not end there.”
Neddenien said most air emissions at the station will be 50 to 80 percent lower than at any other compressor station in Virginia.
The air pollution permit has become a flashpoint in the yearslong fight over the pipeline.
Supporters say it’s needed to help boost the supply of natural gas. Opponents say it is an unnecessary fossil fuel infrastructure project that tramples on land rights and hurts the environment.
With a current pricetag of $6.5 billion to $7.0 billion, the pipeline has recently suffered significant legal setbacks, including a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last month throwing out a permit for the pipeline to cross two national forests, including parts of the Appalachian Trail. Dominion has suspended all project construction and said it plans to appeal the ruling.
John Laury, who lives less than a mile (kilometer) from where the compressor station would be built, said he doesn’t believe assurances from Dominion or state regulators that emissions from the station would not hurt residents’ health or the environment.
“I challenge them to come live in the community with us, to breathe this air, drink this water,” said Laury, 74.
Mike Dowd, the state Department of Environmental Quality’s Air Director, said the department reviewed compressor station permits from around the country and scrutinized pollution control technology.
He said the station will “set a new national standard that all future compressor stations will have to meet across the country.”
Gov. Ralph Northam angered environmentalists and minority groups when he replaced two members of the pollution control board after it delayed a scheduled vote in November.
Northam, a Democrat, said the move was unrelated to the compressor station vote and that members were replaced because their terms had expired.
Two new members didn’t vote Tuesday, nor did a third member who cited a conflict of interest.
Board member William Ferguson said at the hearing that there’s a real need for the pipeline, particularly in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region.(I guess they never heard of solar power!!!)
“The region needs the energy; the state needs the energy,” he said.
His comments prompted a woman to shout: “How much is Dominion paying you?”
Some opponents held pieces of paper with a blown-up photo of the governor’s face and the words “foul” or “shut it down.”
Northam has said he’s agnostic on how the board votes.
“As far as the pipeline … there’s not a lot of middle road on that issue,” Northam said in a recent radio interview. “I’ve tried to be as fair as I can.”
After the board approved the permit, some of the opponents overturned their chairs.
Charles Strickler, a retired dentist, predicted that opponents will not give up their fight.
“I think there are going to be people in front of bulldozers for the pipeline getting arrested,” he said.
The State Air Pollution Control Board voted 4-0 in favor of a key permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would run 600 miles (965 kilometers) and carry fracked natural gas from West Virginia into Virginia and North Carolina.
Some opponents of the project hissed, coughed and shouted during the meeting. Fifteen people were removed by state police, and one woman was charged with trespassing after she laid down on the floor and refused to comply with police verbal commands to leave.
The proposed site for the compressor station is in Union Hill, an unincorporated community founded by freed slaves. The community is in rural Buckingham County, about an hour’s drive west of Richmond.
Opponents are concerned that exhaust from the 54,000-horsepower compressor station would hurt low-income and elderly residents living nearby. Supporters say it will boost development.
The station would be built on 15 acres (6 hectares) of a 70-acre (28-hectare) site, and the rest of the property left undisturbed, according to Dominion Energy, the pipeline’s lead developer. Compressor stations are used to power interstate natural gas pipelines, moving gas through the system.
Paul Wilson, pastor of two Baptist churches near the proposed site, said opponents will keep fighting. He didn’t elaborate on whether they would take legal action.
“We’re looking at all of our avenues,” he said after the vote. “It’s a long way from over. I think Dominion wants to wear people down. But that’s not going to happen.”
Dominion spokesman Karl Neddenien acknowledged in a statement after the vote that it will “have to continue building trust in the community.” He said the project’s backers are making investments in a new community center and rescue squad “but it will not end there.”
Neddenien said most air emissions at the station will be 50 to 80 percent lower than at any other compressor station in Virginia.
The air pollution permit has become a flashpoint in the yearslong fight over the pipeline.
Supporters say it’s needed to help boost the supply of natural gas. Opponents say it is an unnecessary fossil fuel infrastructure project that tramples on land rights and hurts the environment.
With a current pricetag of $6.5 billion to $7.0 billion, the pipeline has recently suffered significant legal setbacks, including a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last month throwing out a permit for the pipeline to cross two national forests, including parts of the Appalachian Trail. Dominion has suspended all project construction and said it plans to appeal the ruling.
John Laury, who lives less than a mile (kilometer) from where the compressor station would be built, said he doesn’t believe assurances from Dominion or state regulators that emissions from the station would not hurt residents’ health or the environment.
“I challenge them to come live in the community with us, to breathe this air, drink this water,” said Laury, 74.
Mike Dowd, the state Department of Environmental Quality’s Air Director, said the department reviewed compressor station permits from around the country and scrutinized pollution control technology.
He said the station will “set a new national standard that all future compressor stations will have to meet across the country.”
Gov. Ralph Northam angered environmentalists and minority groups when he replaced two members of the pollution control board after it delayed a scheduled vote in November.
Northam, a Democrat, said the move was unrelated to the compressor station vote and that members were replaced because their terms had expired.
Two new members didn’t vote Tuesday, nor did a third member who cited a conflict of interest.
Board member William Ferguson said at the hearing that there’s a real need for the pipeline, particularly in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region.(I guess they never heard of solar power!!!)
“The region needs the energy; the state needs the energy,” he said.
His comments prompted a woman to shout: “How much is Dominion paying you?”
Some opponents held pieces of paper with a blown-up photo of the governor’s face and the words “foul” or “shut it down.”
Northam has said he’s agnostic on how the board votes.
“As far as the pipeline … there’s not a lot of middle road on that issue,” Northam said in a recent radio interview. “I’ve tried to be as fair as I can.”
After the board approved the permit, some of the opponents overturned their chairs.
Charles Strickler, a retired dentist, predicted that opponents will not give up their fight.
“I think there are going to be people in front of bulldozers for the pipeline getting arrested,” he said.
Centrist Democrats who lost now want to lecture progressives on how to win
Joe Donnelly attacks Medicare for All; Claire McCaskill derides Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Pro tip: You guys lost
JAKE JOHNSON - salon
DECEMBER 31, 2018 12:00PM (UTC)
Despite losing re-election in November after running on a fervently anti-Medicare for All platform, outgoing Sen. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., confidently declared during a CNN interview on Friday that the bold and increasingly popular solution to America's health care crisis does not inspire voters in states like Indiana.
"When you talk 'Medicare for All' ... you start losing the people in my state," Donnelly said. "The talk on the coasts just doesn't get it done in the middle."
The notion that an ambitious left-wing platform only resonates "on the coasts" and is not electorally viable in more conservative states has become a common trope among "moderate" Democrats, but progressives were quick to push back on Donnelly's evidence-free claim, noting that Medicare for All has high levels of support in Indiana and throughout the Midwest.
"Given that Sen. Donnelly lost saying stuff like this, perhaps the lesson is the opposite — Indianans don't want a Democrat who, like Republicans, opposes good policy," argued Ben Spielberg, co-founder of 34justice, in a tweet on Saturday.
According to the progressive policy shop Data for Progress and the Kaiser Family Foundation, Medicare for All polls at 55 percent support in Indiana—and many were quick to point to this data in response to Donnelly's remarks.
As Warren Gunnels, policy director for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., pointed out, Donnelly ran a campaign ad attacking Medicare for All and the "radical left" while expressing support for President Donald Trump's proposed border wall — and he lost re-election.
By contrast, Gunnels noted, Sanders campaigned on Medicare for All in Indiana during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary and won, demonstrating that voters in the Midwest are open to single-payer health care and other bold progressive policies.
"Hearing Democrats like Joe Donnelly talk about Medicare for All being 'too extreme' for their constituents have clearly never lived a day in their life wondering if they'll have access to the medical care they need for themselves or their loved ones," wrote Alec Uebersohn, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. "The true radicals are those who think the current status quo, or anything close to it, is acceptable. Or that we should settle for it. Or that change is 'unrealistic.'"
Donnelly's parting advice to Democrats came just days after another lawmaker who lost reelection, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., told CNN in an "exit interview" that she is "confused" why bold progressive Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has sparked such enthusiasm among the Democratic electorate.
"I'm a little confused why she's the thing. But it's a good example of what I'm talking about, a bright shiny new object came out of nowhere and surprised people when she beat a very experienced congressman," McCaskill said. "And so she's now talked about a lot. I'm not sure what she's done yet to generate that kind of enthusiasm, but I wish her well. I hope she hangs the moon."
Critics were quick to characterize Donnelly and McCaskill's remarks as lectures to the growing progressive wing of the party, which is increasingly embracing policies like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal.
In a series of tweets on Saturday, Ocasio-Cortez called McCaskill's remarks "pretty disappointing" and noted that the senator lost re-election after running on a conservative platform.
Donnelly's attack on Medicare for All comes as single-payer proponents are gearing up for a prolonged battle against establishment forces — including many former Obama and Clinton campaign officials — who are committed to upholding America's for-profit health care status quo.
As Common Dreams reported, the Progressive Change Campaign Commitee (PCCC) launched a pressure campaign last week urging the incoming House Democratic majority to push for a vote on Medicare for All legislation as soon as possible to "see who stands with over 70 percent of Americans, and who stands with the lobbyists."
In February, National Nurses United is holding a Medicare for All week of action aimed at building on unprecedented grassroots momentum in support of single-payer health care.
"When you talk 'Medicare for All' ... you start losing the people in my state," Donnelly said. "The talk on the coasts just doesn't get it done in the middle."
The notion that an ambitious left-wing platform only resonates "on the coasts" and is not electorally viable in more conservative states has become a common trope among "moderate" Democrats, but progressives were quick to push back on Donnelly's evidence-free claim, noting that Medicare for All has high levels of support in Indiana and throughout the Midwest.
"Given that Sen. Donnelly lost saying stuff like this, perhaps the lesson is the opposite — Indianans don't want a Democrat who, like Republicans, opposes good policy," argued Ben Spielberg, co-founder of 34justice, in a tweet on Saturday.
According to the progressive policy shop Data for Progress and the Kaiser Family Foundation, Medicare for All polls at 55 percent support in Indiana—and many were quick to point to this data in response to Donnelly's remarks.
As Warren Gunnels, policy director for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., pointed out, Donnelly ran a campaign ad attacking Medicare for All and the "radical left" while expressing support for President Donald Trump's proposed border wall — and he lost re-election.
By contrast, Gunnels noted, Sanders campaigned on Medicare for All in Indiana during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary and won, demonstrating that voters in the Midwest are open to single-payer health care and other bold progressive policies.
"Hearing Democrats like Joe Donnelly talk about Medicare for All being 'too extreme' for their constituents have clearly never lived a day in their life wondering if they'll have access to the medical care they need for themselves or their loved ones," wrote Alec Uebersohn, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. "The true radicals are those who think the current status quo, or anything close to it, is acceptable. Or that we should settle for it. Or that change is 'unrealistic.'"
Donnelly's parting advice to Democrats came just days after another lawmaker who lost reelection, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., told CNN in an "exit interview" that she is "confused" why bold progressive Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has sparked such enthusiasm among the Democratic electorate.
"I'm a little confused why she's the thing. But it's a good example of what I'm talking about, a bright shiny new object came out of nowhere and surprised people when she beat a very experienced congressman," McCaskill said. "And so she's now talked about a lot. I'm not sure what she's done yet to generate that kind of enthusiasm, but I wish her well. I hope she hangs the moon."
Critics were quick to characterize Donnelly and McCaskill's remarks as lectures to the growing progressive wing of the party, which is increasingly embracing policies like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal.
In a series of tweets on Saturday, Ocasio-Cortez called McCaskill's remarks "pretty disappointing" and noted that the senator lost re-election after running on a conservative platform.
Donnelly's attack on Medicare for All comes as single-payer proponents are gearing up for a prolonged battle against establishment forces — including many former Obama and Clinton campaign officials — who are committed to upholding America's for-profit health care status quo.
As Common Dreams reported, the Progressive Change Campaign Commitee (PCCC) launched a pressure campaign last week urging the incoming House Democratic majority to push for a vote on Medicare for All legislation as soon as possible to "see who stands with over 70 percent of Americans, and who stands with the lobbyists."
In February, National Nurses United is holding a Medicare for All week of action aimed at building on unprecedented grassroots momentum in support of single-payer health care.
another fraudulent democrat!!!
Beto O’Rourke frequently voted for Republican legislation, analysis reveals
Review of his six-year record in Congress shows Democrat frequently opposed own party, and supported bills that boosted the fossil fuel industry and Trump’s immigration policy
David Sirota
the guardian
Thu 20 Dec 2018 06.00 EST
Beto O’Rourke’s spirited run for the US Senate in Texas last month has prompted powerful voices in the Democratic party establishment to tout the outgoing Texas congressman as a 2020 presidential candidate who, as the party’s standard-bearer, would offer a vision of America contrasting against that of Republicans.
However, a new analysis of congressional votes from the non-profit news organisation Capital & Main shows that even as O’Rourke represented one of the most solidly Democratic congressional districts in the United States, he has frequently voted against the majority of House Democrats in support of Republican bills and Trump administration priorities.
Capital & Main reviewed the 167 votes O’Rourke has cast in the House in opposition to the majority of his own party during his six-year tenure in Congress. Many of those votes were not progressive dissents alongside other left-leaning lawmakers, but instead votes to help pass Republican-sponsored legislation.
O’Rourke has voted for GOP bills that his fellow Democratic lawmakers said reinforced Republicans’ anti-tax ideology, chipped away at the Affordable Care Act (ACA), weakened Wall Street regulations, boosted the fossil fuel industry and bolstered Donald Trump’s immigration policy.
Consumer, environmental, public health and civil rights organizations have cast legislation backed by O’Rourke as aiding big banks, undermining the fight against climate change and supporting Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. During the previous administration, Barack Obama’s White House issued statements slamming two GOP bills backed by the 46-year-old Democratic legislator.
O’Rourke’s votes for Republican legislation – which at times put him at odds with a majority of Texas Democratic lawmakers in Congress – underscore his membership in the New Democrat Coalition, the faction of House Democrats most closely aligned with business interests.
O’Rourke did not respond to questions from Capital & Main about his votes.
O’Rourke was one of a number of younger Democratic candidates who ran unexpectedly strong campaigns in traditionally Republican states in the 2018 midterm elections. His speeches, grassroots fundraising and rejection of corporate PAC money helped his campaign build a strong online following among activists who were hoping the election would result in a Democratic senate majority.
In recent weeks, the possibility of an O’Rourke presidential candidacy has been boosted by former Obama aides and fundraisers, as well as by Third Way – a finance-industry funded thinktank that previously made headlines deriding Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren. He has also been lauded by former Hillary Clinton aide Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress, a Democratic thinktank whose officials recently slammed Republican tax and immigration legislation that O’Rourke voted for. Much of the party elite’s support for an O’Rourke candidacy has not mentioned his policy record or agenda.
In the last two years, O’Rourke was among the top fifth of all lawmakers voting against his own party’s positions. FiveThirtyEight has calculated that in that same time period, O’Rourke has voted for the Trump administration position roughly 30% of the time. The website said that is above what analysts predict would come from a legislator representing a district as Democratic as O’Rourke’s. For comparison, O’Rourke’s congressional district votes more Democratic than than most districts in Massachusetts, according to the Cook Political Report.
Each vote reviewed below was one in which O’Rourke broke from the majority of legislators in his own party.
Consumer protection
Since its creation in 2010, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been under relentless assault by Republicans, who have sought to help the financial industry limit its authority. At times, they have found an ally in O’Rourke.
In one instance, the Texas Democrat helped the GOP challenge the agency’s bulletin, which asserted its “authority to pursue auto lenders whose policies harm consumers through unlawful discrimination”.
Republicans in 2015 introduced legislation to repeal that directive. Civil rights groups such as the NAACP opposed the GOP measure and House Democrats said it was designed to halt “recent actions to root out discriminatory practices among auto lenders”. The Obama White House said it strongly opposed the Republican bill.
O’Rourke nonetheless officially co-sponsored the bill and voted for it. Echoing the GOP’s line of attack on the CFPB, the Democrat faulted the agency for a “lack of openness”, which he asserted had created “uncertainty, criticism of the CFPB’s conclusions, and has made loans more expensive to borrowers”. While O’Rourke later voted against using the Congressional Review Act to kill the CFPB’s regulation, the original bill he voted for set the stage for the GOP to repeal it under Trump.
Also in 2015, O’Rourke voted for a Republican bill that Democrats said would weaken lending disclosure protections for home mortgage borrowers. The Obama administration agreed, issuing a veto threat declaring that the GOP bill aimed to “unnecessarily delay implementation of important consumer protections designed to eradicate opaque lending practices that contribute to risky mortgages, hurt homeowners by removing the private right of action for violations, and undercut the nation’s financial stability”.
The bill passed with the support of O’Rourke, who said: “I believe it is a practical, short-term compromise that will provide long-term benefits to consumers in the United States.” He argued that the GOP legislation would allow regulators to “continue working with banks to ensure that they are ready to fully comply with the law” and “ensure that “consumers applying for home mortgages are given all the information they need”.
Fossil fuels and energy
During his Senate race, O’Rourke was lauded for his rhetoric about the threat of climate change. In Congress, he has questioned the safety of natural gas fracking, and he has high ratings from the League of Conservation Voters.
O’Rourke, however, has also cast key votes with Republicans to boost the fossil fuel industry whose carbon emissions are at the root of the climate crisis.
For instance, O’Rourke was one of only a handful of House Democrats who voted for Republican bills to lift the 40-year-old oil export ban.
During the legislative debate over lifting the ban, the Democrats’ committee report argued that “the extreme approach taken by this bill not only repeals current crude export restrictions, but also ensures that no export restrictions – for any reason – could be implemented or enforced in the future”. The Democratic report added that “the bill could have potentially vast consequences for consumers, the environment and climate change”.
O’Rourke twice voted to lift the ban.
At the same time, O’Rourke helped Republicans vote down Democratic legislation to prevent drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and he backed a separate GOP bill to speed up natural gas exports.
He also supported GOP legislation that Democrats said was constructed to protect the utility industry. Republicans said the measure was designed “to ensure reliable electricity service and reduce the risk of fires and fire hazards caused by inadequate vegetation management” in areas where power lines cross federal lands. Repeating charges made by Democrats in the bill’s committee report, Arizona Democratic representative Raúl Grijalva saidduring the floor debate: “The bill waives liability for companies that start forest fires or cause other damage. This is nonsense and shifts an incredible burden and risk onto American taxpayers.”
O’Rourke was one of 69 Democrats to support the bill, which passed.
Immigration and criminal justice
In representing the border city of El Paso, O’Rourke has been an outspoken advocate for immigration reform. His Senate campaign website said he wants to “pass the Dream Act and ensure that undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children, known as Dreamers, find a permanent home and citizenship in the US.” It also declared that he wants to “end the militarization of our immigration enforcement system”. O’Rourke this month made headlines slamming the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
However, he was one of a group of Democrats who broke party ranks to support Republican legislation to waive requirements for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and job applicants to take polygraph tests – a proposal that was part of the Trump administration’s plan to assemble a deportation force.
A 2012 Government Accountability Office report noted that CBP uses polygraph tests as part of employment background checks “to mitigate the risk of employee corruption and misconduct” and recommended the agency consider expanding the tests.
In April of 2017, the Trump administration issued a memo pushing for authority to waive the polygraph tests in order to expedite the hiring of thousands of new CBP agents. Critics immediately raised red flags – the American Immigration Lawyers Association said it was a plan “to water down hiring standards”. Tom Jawetz, the Center for American Progress’ vice-president for immigration, told Univision that “many agents brought on beforehand who had not gone through a polygraph were cooperating with cartels and subject to corruption”. James Tomsheck, the CBP’s former head of internal affairs, called the idea of waivers “preposterous” in light of what the polygraph tests had been finding.
Two days after the Trump administration’s memo, Republicans led by immigration hardliner Representative Martha McSally of Arizona introduced legislation to allow the polygraph tests to be waived. Democrats adamantly objected.
New Mexico Democratic representative Michelle Lujan Grisham, chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said: “Eliminating the critical polygraph requirements for certain CBP applicants only undermines our nation’s safety, given this agency’s historic connection to organized crime, drug cartels, and corruption.” She asserted that “no other federal law enforcement agency in the country – not the FBI, DEA, ATF or Secret Service – makes any exceptions to their polygraph exam”.
Democratic congressman Luis Gutierrez, declared that: “Anyone who votes for this bill is voting to support and implement Donald Trump’s views on immigration, his desire to militarize our southern border, and his fantasy of a mass deportation force.”
O’Rourke opted to join Republicans in voting for the bill, which passed. He said the measure was necessary to “help speed up the hiring process and provide the CBP Commissioner additional authorities to recruit and hire quality CBP officers and border patrol agents”.
During the same two-month stretch, O’Rourke also broke ranks from his party in supporting GOP legislation that, according to GovTrack, would “add the killing or attempted killing [of] a law enforcement officer to the list of aggravating factors in federal death penalty cases”.
The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights said the bill was “an unnecessary and misguided attempt to politicize the unfortunate deaths of law enforcement officers and could ultimately exacerbate existing tension between law enforcement and the communities they serve, especially African Americans”.
Democratic representative Jerry Nadler of New York argued that it would change the fundamental threshold for capital punishment by “impos[ing] a death penalty for attempted murder”.
O’Rourke was one of 48 Democrats to join Republicans in supporting the legislation, which passed.
Regulating Wall Street
O’Rourke has a somewhat mixed record on financial issues, according to the watchdog group Americans for Financial Reform (AFR). At times he has voted with Democrats to protect existing regulations. Still, he has also frequently aided the GOP in some of its efforts to deregulate Wall Street.
For instance, in 2014 and 2018 O’Rourke cast votes for GOP bills that included provisions weakening the so-called Volcker Rule, which aims to prevent financial firms from using depositors’ savings for their own speculative trading.
In 2017 and 2018, O’Rourke also voted for:
Healthcare
O’Rourke has been a supporter of improving Obamacare, expanding Medicaid and adding a public option to compete with private insurance. At times, though, he broke with the majority of House Democrats to help Republicans try to chip away at the healthcare law, and in one instance, he backed a GOP bill Democrats said was designed to prop up the Trump administration’s attempts to replace Obamacare.
The ACA established the independent payment advisory board to recommend ways to reduce Medicare spending. According to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the language creating the board prohibited it from proposing rationing, reduced benefits, higher premiums or restricted eligibility.
Despite those safeguards, Republicans led by former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin soon pointed to the board as proof that Democrats were aiming to create “death panels”. As that mythology spread throughoutconservative media, Republicans in 2015 and 2017 brought up legislation to stoke those fears and eliminate the board. O’Rourke defied his party and twice voted with Republicans to kill the board. He also officially co-sponsored both measures.
Additionally, when Republicans were pushing to replace the ACA with Trump’s American Health Care Act (AHCA), O’Rourke voted for Republican legislation to provide special tax credits for Cobra benefits – an initiative that Democratic representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts said was “simply a backdoor way for states to discriminate against existing conditions”.
In 2017, O’Rourke joined his party in voting against Trump’s tax cut package. His Senate campaign website cited deficit concerns about those tax cuts’ cost.
But that was not the end of the story. Within months, Republicans began pressing a new package of tax cuts that Democratic groups such as the Center for American Progress deemed the “tax scam 2”. One piece of that package was a proposal that a critical Los Angeles Times editorial said “would carve out a new tax shelter for start-up businesses”. The Center for American Progress singled out those provisions as one of the objectionable aspects of the tax package.
As Democrats sought to present a unified front against the new GOP tax cuts, O’Rourke broke ranks with House Democrats – and most of the Texas Democratic delegation – to vote for the GOP legislation. He supported the initiative, even though the Congressional Budget Office warned that the bill would expand the deficit.
However, a new analysis of congressional votes from the non-profit news organisation Capital & Main shows that even as O’Rourke represented one of the most solidly Democratic congressional districts in the United States, he has frequently voted against the majority of House Democrats in support of Republican bills and Trump administration priorities.
Capital & Main reviewed the 167 votes O’Rourke has cast in the House in opposition to the majority of his own party during his six-year tenure in Congress. Many of those votes were not progressive dissents alongside other left-leaning lawmakers, but instead votes to help pass Republican-sponsored legislation.
O’Rourke has voted for GOP bills that his fellow Democratic lawmakers said reinforced Republicans’ anti-tax ideology, chipped away at the Affordable Care Act (ACA), weakened Wall Street regulations, boosted the fossil fuel industry and bolstered Donald Trump’s immigration policy.
Consumer, environmental, public health and civil rights organizations have cast legislation backed by O’Rourke as aiding big banks, undermining the fight against climate change and supporting Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. During the previous administration, Barack Obama’s White House issued statements slamming two GOP bills backed by the 46-year-old Democratic legislator.
O’Rourke’s votes for Republican legislation – which at times put him at odds with a majority of Texas Democratic lawmakers in Congress – underscore his membership in the New Democrat Coalition, the faction of House Democrats most closely aligned with business interests.
O’Rourke did not respond to questions from Capital & Main about his votes.
O’Rourke was one of a number of younger Democratic candidates who ran unexpectedly strong campaigns in traditionally Republican states in the 2018 midterm elections. His speeches, grassroots fundraising and rejection of corporate PAC money helped his campaign build a strong online following among activists who were hoping the election would result in a Democratic senate majority.
In recent weeks, the possibility of an O’Rourke presidential candidacy has been boosted by former Obama aides and fundraisers, as well as by Third Way – a finance-industry funded thinktank that previously made headlines deriding Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren. He has also been lauded by former Hillary Clinton aide Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress, a Democratic thinktank whose officials recently slammed Republican tax and immigration legislation that O’Rourke voted for. Much of the party elite’s support for an O’Rourke candidacy has not mentioned his policy record or agenda.
In the last two years, O’Rourke was among the top fifth of all lawmakers voting against his own party’s positions. FiveThirtyEight has calculated that in that same time period, O’Rourke has voted for the Trump administration position roughly 30% of the time. The website said that is above what analysts predict would come from a legislator representing a district as Democratic as O’Rourke’s. For comparison, O’Rourke’s congressional district votes more Democratic than than most districts in Massachusetts, according to the Cook Political Report.
Each vote reviewed below was one in which O’Rourke broke from the majority of legislators in his own party.
Consumer protection
Since its creation in 2010, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been under relentless assault by Republicans, who have sought to help the financial industry limit its authority. At times, they have found an ally in O’Rourke.
In one instance, the Texas Democrat helped the GOP challenge the agency’s bulletin, which asserted its “authority to pursue auto lenders whose policies harm consumers through unlawful discrimination”.
Republicans in 2015 introduced legislation to repeal that directive. Civil rights groups such as the NAACP opposed the GOP measure and House Democrats said it was designed to halt “recent actions to root out discriminatory practices among auto lenders”. The Obama White House said it strongly opposed the Republican bill.
O’Rourke nonetheless officially co-sponsored the bill and voted for it. Echoing the GOP’s line of attack on the CFPB, the Democrat faulted the agency for a “lack of openness”, which he asserted had created “uncertainty, criticism of the CFPB’s conclusions, and has made loans more expensive to borrowers”. While O’Rourke later voted against using the Congressional Review Act to kill the CFPB’s regulation, the original bill he voted for set the stage for the GOP to repeal it under Trump.
Also in 2015, O’Rourke voted for a Republican bill that Democrats said would weaken lending disclosure protections for home mortgage borrowers. The Obama administration agreed, issuing a veto threat declaring that the GOP bill aimed to “unnecessarily delay implementation of important consumer protections designed to eradicate opaque lending practices that contribute to risky mortgages, hurt homeowners by removing the private right of action for violations, and undercut the nation’s financial stability”.
The bill passed with the support of O’Rourke, who said: “I believe it is a practical, short-term compromise that will provide long-term benefits to consumers in the United States.” He argued that the GOP legislation would allow regulators to “continue working with banks to ensure that they are ready to fully comply with the law” and “ensure that “consumers applying for home mortgages are given all the information they need”.
Fossil fuels and energy
During his Senate race, O’Rourke was lauded for his rhetoric about the threat of climate change. In Congress, he has questioned the safety of natural gas fracking, and he has high ratings from the League of Conservation Voters.
O’Rourke, however, has also cast key votes with Republicans to boost the fossil fuel industry whose carbon emissions are at the root of the climate crisis.
For instance, O’Rourke was one of only a handful of House Democrats who voted for Republican bills to lift the 40-year-old oil export ban.
During the legislative debate over lifting the ban, the Democrats’ committee report argued that “the extreme approach taken by this bill not only repeals current crude export restrictions, but also ensures that no export restrictions – for any reason – could be implemented or enforced in the future”. The Democratic report added that “the bill could have potentially vast consequences for consumers, the environment and climate change”.
O’Rourke twice voted to lift the ban.
At the same time, O’Rourke helped Republicans vote down Democratic legislation to prevent drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and he backed a separate GOP bill to speed up natural gas exports.
He also supported GOP legislation that Democrats said was constructed to protect the utility industry. Republicans said the measure was designed “to ensure reliable electricity service and reduce the risk of fires and fire hazards caused by inadequate vegetation management” in areas where power lines cross federal lands. Repeating charges made by Democrats in the bill’s committee report, Arizona Democratic representative Raúl Grijalva saidduring the floor debate: “The bill waives liability for companies that start forest fires or cause other damage. This is nonsense and shifts an incredible burden and risk onto American taxpayers.”
O’Rourke was one of 69 Democrats to support the bill, which passed.
Immigration and criminal justice
In representing the border city of El Paso, O’Rourke has been an outspoken advocate for immigration reform. His Senate campaign website said he wants to “pass the Dream Act and ensure that undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children, known as Dreamers, find a permanent home and citizenship in the US.” It also declared that he wants to “end the militarization of our immigration enforcement system”. O’Rourke this month made headlines slamming the Trump administration’s immigration policy.
However, he was one of a group of Democrats who broke party ranks to support Republican legislation to waive requirements for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and job applicants to take polygraph tests – a proposal that was part of the Trump administration’s plan to assemble a deportation force.
A 2012 Government Accountability Office report noted that CBP uses polygraph tests as part of employment background checks “to mitigate the risk of employee corruption and misconduct” and recommended the agency consider expanding the tests.
In April of 2017, the Trump administration issued a memo pushing for authority to waive the polygraph tests in order to expedite the hiring of thousands of new CBP agents. Critics immediately raised red flags – the American Immigration Lawyers Association said it was a plan “to water down hiring standards”. Tom Jawetz, the Center for American Progress’ vice-president for immigration, told Univision that “many agents brought on beforehand who had not gone through a polygraph were cooperating with cartels and subject to corruption”. James Tomsheck, the CBP’s former head of internal affairs, called the idea of waivers “preposterous” in light of what the polygraph tests had been finding.
Two days after the Trump administration’s memo, Republicans led by immigration hardliner Representative Martha McSally of Arizona introduced legislation to allow the polygraph tests to be waived. Democrats adamantly objected.
New Mexico Democratic representative Michelle Lujan Grisham, chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said: “Eliminating the critical polygraph requirements for certain CBP applicants only undermines our nation’s safety, given this agency’s historic connection to organized crime, drug cartels, and corruption.” She asserted that “no other federal law enforcement agency in the country – not the FBI, DEA, ATF or Secret Service – makes any exceptions to their polygraph exam”.
Democratic congressman Luis Gutierrez, declared that: “Anyone who votes for this bill is voting to support and implement Donald Trump’s views on immigration, his desire to militarize our southern border, and his fantasy of a mass deportation force.”
O’Rourke opted to join Republicans in voting for the bill, which passed. He said the measure was necessary to “help speed up the hiring process and provide the CBP Commissioner additional authorities to recruit and hire quality CBP officers and border patrol agents”.
During the same two-month stretch, O’Rourke also broke ranks from his party in supporting GOP legislation that, according to GovTrack, would “add the killing or attempted killing [of] a law enforcement officer to the list of aggravating factors in federal death penalty cases”.
The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights said the bill was “an unnecessary and misguided attempt to politicize the unfortunate deaths of law enforcement officers and could ultimately exacerbate existing tension between law enforcement and the communities they serve, especially African Americans”.
Democratic representative Jerry Nadler of New York argued that it would change the fundamental threshold for capital punishment by “impos[ing] a death penalty for attempted murder”.
O’Rourke was one of 48 Democrats to join Republicans in supporting the legislation, which passed.
Regulating Wall Street
O’Rourke has a somewhat mixed record on financial issues, according to the watchdog group Americans for Financial Reform (AFR). At times he has voted with Democrats to protect existing regulations. Still, he has also frequently aided the GOP in some of its efforts to deregulate Wall Street.
For instance, in 2014 and 2018 O’Rourke cast votes for GOP bills that included provisions weakening the so-called Volcker Rule, which aims to prevent financial firms from using depositors’ savings for their own speculative trading.
In 2017 and 2018, O’Rourke also voted for:
- GOP legislation that Democrats said would empower financial institutions to shield themselves from bank examiners.
- A package of Republican bills that Democrats said would reduce independent audits of corporations, deregulate stock exchanges and high-frequency trading.
- A Republican bill to permit larger number of bank holding companies to take on more debt.
- And a Republican bill that Democrats said would “eliminate meaningful, clear disclosures to consumers about their privacy rights, including their ability to opt-out from having their information sold to unaffiliated third party companies”.
Healthcare
O’Rourke has been a supporter of improving Obamacare, expanding Medicaid and adding a public option to compete with private insurance. At times, though, he broke with the majority of House Democrats to help Republicans try to chip away at the healthcare law, and in one instance, he backed a GOP bill Democrats said was designed to prop up the Trump administration’s attempts to replace Obamacare.
The ACA established the independent payment advisory board to recommend ways to reduce Medicare spending. According to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the language creating the board prohibited it from proposing rationing, reduced benefits, higher premiums or restricted eligibility.
Despite those safeguards, Republicans led by former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin soon pointed to the board as proof that Democrats were aiming to create “death panels”. As that mythology spread throughoutconservative media, Republicans in 2015 and 2017 brought up legislation to stoke those fears and eliminate the board. O’Rourke defied his party and twice voted with Republicans to kill the board. He also officially co-sponsored both measures.
Additionally, when Republicans were pushing to replace the ACA with Trump’s American Health Care Act (AHCA), O’Rourke voted for Republican legislation to provide special tax credits for Cobra benefits – an initiative that Democratic representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts said was “simply a backdoor way for states to discriminate against existing conditions”.
In 2017, O’Rourke joined his party in voting against Trump’s tax cut package. His Senate campaign website cited deficit concerns about those tax cuts’ cost.
But that was not the end of the story. Within months, Republicans began pressing a new package of tax cuts that Democratic groups such as the Center for American Progress deemed the “tax scam 2”. One piece of that package was a proposal that a critical Los Angeles Times editorial said “would carve out a new tax shelter for start-up businesses”. The Center for American Progress singled out those provisions as one of the objectionable aspects of the tax package.
As Democrats sought to present a unified front against the new GOP tax cuts, O’Rourke broke ranks with House Democrats – and most of the Texas Democratic delegation – to vote for the GOP legislation. He supported the initiative, even though the Congressional Budget Office warned that the bill would expand the deficit.
a scam group protecting the status quo!!!
EMAILS SHOW POLITICAL GROUP NO LABELS GAVE WORK TO FIRMS LINKED TO FOUNDER’S HUSBAND
Rachel M. Cohen, Ryan Grim - the intercept
December 19 2018, 6:09 a.m.
NO LABELS, A group that works to elect centrist candidates from both parties, has been grappling internally with conflicts of interest tied to its use of political consulting firms linked to the group’s leadership, according to documents and email correspondence obtained by The Intercept.
It’s been a rough few weeks of public scrutiny for No Labels. A Daily Beastinvestigation published earlier this month revealed that despite the group’s professed interest in reducing partisanship, it had solicited money from wealthy, partisan donors, many of them from the world of finance, on both sides of the political spectrum, and had considered making Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi a “bogeyman.”
The group was also in the news because the No Labels-backed House Problem Solvers Caucus, comprised of 24 Democrats and 24 Republicans, was organizing to block Pelosi’s bid for speaker of the House unless she agreed to a series of their proposed legislative reforms. The Democratic chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus is New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a protégé of Mark Penn, who urged Hillary Clinton to attack Barack Obama as un-American in the 2008 presidential primary. As The Intercept previously reported, Penn, a longtime partisan and the husband of No Labels’s head Nancy Jacobson, is closely involved with the group’s work.
Jacobson pushed back on Daily Beast questions about Penn’s involvement in No Labels as “shameful and sexist.” She asked if a man were running the organization, would reporters still suggest — “based on little to no evidence — that his spouse is serving as the puppet master behind the scenes?”
Emails obtained by The Intercept show Jacobson consulting her husband on No Labels decision-making, and Penn himself executing strategy for No Labels campaigns. This past May, for instance, when discussing ad buys for the congressional race in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley district (No Labels backed John Morganelli, an anti-choice, pro-Trump Democrat who lost the primary to Susan Wild), Jacobson looped her husband in on discussions and said, “Mark penn can you advise?” Penn was similarly asked to weigh in on ad spending and strategy on behalf of Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., whom No Labels backed in a primary race.
The Intercept confirmed the authenticity of the emails with three sources who previously worked with No Labels.
A lawsuit filed in September by the political consulting firm Applecart alleged that No Labels shorted them on millions of dollars, and terminated their relationship to hire consultants with financial ties to Jacobson and Penn. No Labels maintains that Applecart’s performance was unsatisfactory. Dan Webb, an attorney representing political organizations allied with No Labels, provided The Intercept a statement on behalf of the group. “No Labels is currently in litigation with Applecart, which limits what we can say at this time. Having botched their work for the PACs, Applecart is attempting to spin a false narrative in an effort to harm the PACs and No Labels,” he said.
In 2015, Penn founded Stagwell Group, a private-equity firm that soon bought Democratic consultancy firm SKDKnickerbocker. Stagwell also purchased a polling firm, Harris, and a minority stake in the Republican consulting company, Targeted Victory. Penn remains president and managing partner at Stagwell.
No Labels has employed the services of Harris for polling and uses Victory Passport, an affiliate of Targeted Victory, for its online fundraising. Emails show SKDK’s Andrew Shipley and Bill Knapp also working with No Labels — and Penn directly — on television ads in the 2018 primary season, though SKDK maintains that the company did not work with No Labels on anything.
One email Shipley sent in March to Jacobson, Penn, and others has the subject line “Tentative Media Buy” and is addressed to “Mark and team.”
Another March email cited Shipley as having worked on a television ad for Lipinski, though Jacobson replied that “SKDK was conflicted out” — suggesting that Shipley had either stopped at some point or been removed at the beginning.
In an earlier exchange from February, Jacobson emailed Penn for his advice on how to spend money in the Lipinski race. “Do you have a position if we should spend more?”
“My position is you need to add cable from here to election,” Penn told her.
Jacobson responded by saying that No Labels currently had no plans for cable, but she brought other members of the team into the email exchange to ask if they could trim their budgets so that Penn’s strategy could be executed.
Two days later, emails between Jacobson, Penn, and Knapp show Knapp explaining that SKDK couldn’t work on an ad for Lipinski because his company had clients on the other side of the contest: NARAL and Planned Parenthood were major SKDK clients backing primary challenger Marie Newman. Human Rights Campaign was also heavily involved in backing Newman and has been a client of SKDK.
He offered to refer the work to a separate consulting firm, 2k Strategies, owned by a former SKDK employee, but remain involved. “I would/could be on a first organizing call and will bird dog the creative to make sure it’s right,” Knapp told them on February 26.
Penn clearly believed that he was working with Knapp on the Lipinski project. Later that day, he emailed Jacobson, “Tomorrow cleared to get the ad done with bills [sic] team.”
By March 3, things were moving, and No Labels had budgeted $408,000 for an ad buy, which Knapp, with Shipley copied on the chain, was put in charge of placing. “You are scoping the buy and I’ll then decide who to use based on which one I like better,” Penn wrote to Knapp.
On March 5, Shipley wrote back to “Mark and team” with the news that “we had to go with a new buyer since two of our buyers are conflicted out between the race [and] the IE.”
Shipley on March 7 noted that a $21,000 bill for work to Penn and Jacobson was on its way. “And we have a production bill coming shortly for about 21k,” he wrote.
Knapp told The Intercept that he offered to help as a volunteer and did so by connecting Jacobson to a different media consultant. “We decided as a firm to not work for Lapinski [sic] directly or through any third party organization/group,” he wrote in an email. “We also long ago decided as a firm not work [sic] for No Labels. Nancy is a long time friend and I sometimes look at scripts and help her, but I don’t work for her organization. We didn’t work on the race as a firm, we did not produce an ad for Lapinski [sic] and we have never worked for No Labels.” He said that the vendor erroneously sent the invoice to SKDK, so Shipley simply forwarded it to No Labels, but no money changed hands.
Newman’s challenge to Lipinski — who is anti-choice, opposed to marriage equality, hostile to immigration, and against a $15 an hour minimum wage — was the first high-profile insurgent primary of the 2018 cycle, and she had the broad support of major progressive groups. No Labels spent more than $1 million and made the difference in the race, in the assessment of operatives who worked on both sides. On Election Day on March 21, Lipinski narrowly beat Newman by just over 2,000 votes.
Officials with SKDK also got involved in the Pennsylvania race. An email on May 7 shows Shipley working on a No Labels ad for that contest, with Shipley writing, “We are working on the edit and graphics and plan to have something to share later this afternoon. In terms of a voiceover, do you have a preference of male versus female. My original thinking was going with the white male.”
Later that day, Shipley forwarded a script to No Labels. “Can we confirm this being [sic] paid for by United for Progress,” he asked, referring to a No Labels Super PAC. A No Labels consultant replied that, in fact, it was being funded by a different one, called “United Together.”
Shipley did not return a request for comment, but Knapp said that Shipley shared with him The Intercept’s inquiry and that SKDK did not work on the Pennsylvania race. “Ship knows Nancy and connected the media consultant with our production facilities and Shipley helped coordinate that,” Knapp said. “My recollection was it was a positive ad. Again, we didn’t do the race and did not make money doing the race.”
ADDITIONAL EMAILS AND documents reviewed by The Intercept point to other potential conflicts of interest involving No Labels and Penn’s Stagwell Group.
In August 2017, Jacobson sent an email to No Labels staff, saying, “For republican races would like to use targeted victory.” Targeted Victory is the firm part-owned by Penn’s Stagwell Group.
On April 10, 2018, back when No Labels was still working with Applecart, Jacobson sent an email to an Applecart consultant, copying Targeted Victory CEO Zac Moffatt and wrote, “Matt you are using targeted victory for digital ads for Republicans right?”
And in late March, according to an email reviewed by The Intercept, a representative for a No Labels donor expressed concern over the organization having “perceived or potential” conflicts of interest. They urged Jacobson to disclose potential conflicts to the No Labels governing board. “We believe that all Governing Board members need to be aware of the situation in order to prevent any misunderstanding and confusion going forward,” they wrote.
No Labels then worked to prepare a list of potential conflicts. In an email dated April 13, Jacobson noted that No Labels is “no longer using targeted victory” and suggested leaving that company off its disclosure list. “Why open the door?” she asked.
In a memo prepared for the No Labels’s governing board, the group outlines business it did with Marlin Strategies, which is run by a former SKDK staffer, and Schule Media, which was referred to No Labels by SKDK. The memo says, “Mark Penn wrote and advised on the [Marlin Strategies] TV ad” but “did so pro bono.” With regards to Targeted Victory, No Labels disclosed just that the company worked on the Lipinski race.
The memo also listed business No Labels did with Rising Tide Interactive, a Democratic digital advertising firm founded by Eli Kaplan, the fiancé (and now husband) of No Labels’ vice president and chief of staff, Sasha Borowsky. Borowsky worked at No Labels from 2012 until this past October.
Mark Penn did not respond to questions about the specific nature of the work he has done for No Labels on a paid or unpaid basis, and whether he has recommended that No Labels work with any companies in which he has a vested financial interest.
It’s been a rough few weeks of public scrutiny for No Labels. A Daily Beastinvestigation published earlier this month revealed that despite the group’s professed interest in reducing partisanship, it had solicited money from wealthy, partisan donors, many of them from the world of finance, on both sides of the political spectrum, and had considered making Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi a “bogeyman.”
The group was also in the news because the No Labels-backed House Problem Solvers Caucus, comprised of 24 Democrats and 24 Republicans, was organizing to block Pelosi’s bid for speaker of the House unless she agreed to a series of their proposed legislative reforms. The Democratic chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus is New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a protégé of Mark Penn, who urged Hillary Clinton to attack Barack Obama as un-American in the 2008 presidential primary. As The Intercept previously reported, Penn, a longtime partisan and the husband of No Labels’s head Nancy Jacobson, is closely involved with the group’s work.
Jacobson pushed back on Daily Beast questions about Penn’s involvement in No Labels as “shameful and sexist.” She asked if a man were running the organization, would reporters still suggest — “based on little to no evidence — that his spouse is serving as the puppet master behind the scenes?”
Emails obtained by The Intercept show Jacobson consulting her husband on No Labels decision-making, and Penn himself executing strategy for No Labels campaigns. This past May, for instance, when discussing ad buys for the congressional race in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley district (No Labels backed John Morganelli, an anti-choice, pro-Trump Democrat who lost the primary to Susan Wild), Jacobson looped her husband in on discussions and said, “Mark penn can you advise?” Penn was similarly asked to weigh in on ad spending and strategy on behalf of Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., whom No Labels backed in a primary race.
The Intercept confirmed the authenticity of the emails with three sources who previously worked with No Labels.
A lawsuit filed in September by the political consulting firm Applecart alleged that No Labels shorted them on millions of dollars, and terminated their relationship to hire consultants with financial ties to Jacobson and Penn. No Labels maintains that Applecart’s performance was unsatisfactory. Dan Webb, an attorney representing political organizations allied with No Labels, provided The Intercept a statement on behalf of the group. “No Labels is currently in litigation with Applecart, which limits what we can say at this time. Having botched their work for the PACs, Applecart is attempting to spin a false narrative in an effort to harm the PACs and No Labels,” he said.
In 2015, Penn founded Stagwell Group, a private-equity firm that soon bought Democratic consultancy firm SKDKnickerbocker. Stagwell also purchased a polling firm, Harris, and a minority stake in the Republican consulting company, Targeted Victory. Penn remains president and managing partner at Stagwell.
No Labels has employed the services of Harris for polling and uses Victory Passport, an affiliate of Targeted Victory, for its online fundraising. Emails show SKDK’s Andrew Shipley and Bill Knapp also working with No Labels — and Penn directly — on television ads in the 2018 primary season, though SKDK maintains that the company did not work with No Labels on anything.
One email Shipley sent in March to Jacobson, Penn, and others has the subject line “Tentative Media Buy” and is addressed to “Mark and team.”
Another March email cited Shipley as having worked on a television ad for Lipinski, though Jacobson replied that “SKDK was conflicted out” — suggesting that Shipley had either stopped at some point or been removed at the beginning.
In an earlier exchange from February, Jacobson emailed Penn for his advice on how to spend money in the Lipinski race. “Do you have a position if we should spend more?”
“My position is you need to add cable from here to election,” Penn told her.
Jacobson responded by saying that No Labels currently had no plans for cable, but she brought other members of the team into the email exchange to ask if they could trim their budgets so that Penn’s strategy could be executed.
Two days later, emails between Jacobson, Penn, and Knapp show Knapp explaining that SKDK couldn’t work on an ad for Lipinski because his company had clients on the other side of the contest: NARAL and Planned Parenthood were major SKDK clients backing primary challenger Marie Newman. Human Rights Campaign was also heavily involved in backing Newman and has been a client of SKDK.
He offered to refer the work to a separate consulting firm, 2k Strategies, owned by a former SKDK employee, but remain involved. “I would/could be on a first organizing call and will bird dog the creative to make sure it’s right,” Knapp told them on February 26.
Penn clearly believed that he was working with Knapp on the Lipinski project. Later that day, he emailed Jacobson, “Tomorrow cleared to get the ad done with bills [sic] team.”
By March 3, things were moving, and No Labels had budgeted $408,000 for an ad buy, which Knapp, with Shipley copied on the chain, was put in charge of placing. “You are scoping the buy and I’ll then decide who to use based on which one I like better,” Penn wrote to Knapp.
On March 5, Shipley wrote back to “Mark and team” with the news that “we had to go with a new buyer since two of our buyers are conflicted out between the race [and] the IE.”
Shipley on March 7 noted that a $21,000 bill for work to Penn and Jacobson was on its way. “And we have a production bill coming shortly for about 21k,” he wrote.
Knapp told The Intercept that he offered to help as a volunteer and did so by connecting Jacobson to a different media consultant. “We decided as a firm to not work for Lapinski [sic] directly or through any third party organization/group,” he wrote in an email. “We also long ago decided as a firm not work [sic] for No Labels. Nancy is a long time friend and I sometimes look at scripts and help her, but I don’t work for her organization. We didn’t work on the race as a firm, we did not produce an ad for Lapinski [sic] and we have never worked for No Labels.” He said that the vendor erroneously sent the invoice to SKDK, so Shipley simply forwarded it to No Labels, but no money changed hands.
Newman’s challenge to Lipinski — who is anti-choice, opposed to marriage equality, hostile to immigration, and against a $15 an hour minimum wage — was the first high-profile insurgent primary of the 2018 cycle, and she had the broad support of major progressive groups. No Labels spent more than $1 million and made the difference in the race, in the assessment of operatives who worked on both sides. On Election Day on March 21, Lipinski narrowly beat Newman by just over 2,000 votes.
Officials with SKDK also got involved in the Pennsylvania race. An email on May 7 shows Shipley working on a No Labels ad for that contest, with Shipley writing, “We are working on the edit and graphics and plan to have something to share later this afternoon. In terms of a voiceover, do you have a preference of male versus female. My original thinking was going with the white male.”
Later that day, Shipley forwarded a script to No Labels. “Can we confirm this being [sic] paid for by United for Progress,” he asked, referring to a No Labels Super PAC. A No Labels consultant replied that, in fact, it was being funded by a different one, called “United Together.”
Shipley did not return a request for comment, but Knapp said that Shipley shared with him The Intercept’s inquiry and that SKDK did not work on the Pennsylvania race. “Ship knows Nancy and connected the media consultant with our production facilities and Shipley helped coordinate that,” Knapp said. “My recollection was it was a positive ad. Again, we didn’t do the race and did not make money doing the race.”
ADDITIONAL EMAILS AND documents reviewed by The Intercept point to other potential conflicts of interest involving No Labels and Penn’s Stagwell Group.
In August 2017, Jacobson sent an email to No Labels staff, saying, “For republican races would like to use targeted victory.” Targeted Victory is the firm part-owned by Penn’s Stagwell Group.
On April 10, 2018, back when No Labels was still working with Applecart, Jacobson sent an email to an Applecart consultant, copying Targeted Victory CEO Zac Moffatt and wrote, “Matt you are using targeted victory for digital ads for Republicans right?”
And in late March, according to an email reviewed by The Intercept, a representative for a No Labels donor expressed concern over the organization having “perceived or potential” conflicts of interest. They urged Jacobson to disclose potential conflicts to the No Labels governing board. “We believe that all Governing Board members need to be aware of the situation in order to prevent any misunderstanding and confusion going forward,” they wrote.
No Labels then worked to prepare a list of potential conflicts. In an email dated April 13, Jacobson noted that No Labels is “no longer using targeted victory” and suggested leaving that company off its disclosure list. “Why open the door?” she asked.
In a memo prepared for the No Labels’s governing board, the group outlines business it did with Marlin Strategies, which is run by a former SKDK staffer, and Schule Media, which was referred to No Labels by SKDK. The memo says, “Mark Penn wrote and advised on the [Marlin Strategies] TV ad” but “did so pro bono.” With regards to Targeted Victory, No Labels disclosed just that the company worked on the Lipinski race.
The memo also listed business No Labels did with Rising Tide Interactive, a Democratic digital advertising firm founded by Eli Kaplan, the fiancé (and now husband) of No Labels’ vice president and chief of staff, Sasha Borowsky. Borowsky worked at No Labels from 2012 until this past October.
Mark Penn did not respond to questions about the specific nature of the work he has done for No Labels on a paid or unpaid basis, and whether he has recommended that No Labels work with any companies in which he has a vested financial interest.
Over 90% of the anti-Pelosi Democrats have voted with Trump more often than Pelosi
10 of these 11 incumbent Democrats have supported Trump's agenda more frequently than the former House Speaker.
FRANK DALE - thinkprogress
NOV 21, 2018, 8:00 AM
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is likely to become Speaker of the House for the second time when the new Democratic majority is seated in January.
There is one obstacle in Pelosi’s way: A much-publicized bid, mounted by a breakaway group of Democrats seeking to end Pelosi’s reign as leader of the House Democrats, a position she has held since 2003. Their effort, however, met a setback on Tuesday when Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), who was at one point put forward as this opposition group’s choice to repeal and replace Pelosi, announced she would be backing Pelosi instead.
The anti-Pelosi faction has not come up with an alternative to Fudge since the Ohio Congresswoman made her decision.
On Monday, a long-rumored letter of Democratic opposition to Pelosi, who has served in Congress since 1987, was released with the signatures of 16 House Democrats.
Of those 16, only 11 are currently serving in Congress. The remaining five include three Democrats who were just elected to the House of Representatives for the first time in the recent midterm elections, and two other Democrats hoping to join this freshman class of lawmakers, whose races had not yet been called at the time of this writing.
Of the 11 who are currently serving, 10 have voted with President Donald Trump more frequently than Pelosi, who was recently rated as one of the most progressive members of the House by Mother Jones.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s congressional Trump tracker, Pelosi has voted with the Republican president 19.3 percent of the time.
Here are how the House Democrats who oppose her stack up.
Rep. Jim Cooper (TN): 38 percent
Cooper represents the 5th congressional district that contains Nashville, a reliably Democratic D+7 area per the Cook Partisan Voting Index, which “measures how each district performs at the presidential level compared to the nation as a whole.”
Despite this, the nine-term congressman has supported Trump’s policies nearly 40 percent of the time, including backing “Kate’s Law” to increase penalties for undocumented immigrants who re-enter the U.S. and a failed push to add a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
Rep. Kurt Schrader (OR): 31.5 percent
Schrader represents the 5th congressional district on the state’s central coast, in which voters supported Trump in 2016 after backing President Barack Obama in 2012 and 2008.
The six-term congressman has voted with the GOP president almost a third of the time, including on bills to roll back financial regulations put in place after the Great Recession and make conceal-carry gun permits legal across state lines.
Rep. Stephen Lynch (MA): 30 percent
Lynch has supported Trump’s agenda almost a third of the time despite representing the 8th congressional district near Boston that favors Democrats by double-digits (D+10) in Cook’s ratings.
The nine-term congressman voted for “Kate’s Law” and the bill supporting ICE.
Rep. Kathleen Rice (NY): 28.9 percent
Rice represents the D+4 4th congressional district on Long Island. The two-term congresswoman has voted with Trump nearly 30 percent of the time.
Rice supported the effort to roll back Dodd-Frank regulations put in place after the Great Recession. She also voted present on the pro-ICE bill.
Rep. Ed Perlmutter (CO): 27.2 percent
Perlmutter’s 7th congressional district near Denver is rated as a safe D+6 area by Cook.
However, the seven-term congressman has supported Trump over a quarter of the time, including backing the GOP’s omnibus spending bill. He also voted present on the pro-ICE bill.
Rep. Filemón Vela (TX): 23.6 percent
Vela represents the heavily-Hispanic 34th congressional district that contains Corpus Christi and is rated as D+10 by Cook.
Despite this, the four-term congressman has supported Trump’s agenda nearly a quarter of the time, also backing the rollback of Dodd-Frank financial regulations.
Rep. Bill Foster (IL): 22 percent
Foster’s 11th congressional district, which includes Joliet, is rated as D+9 by Cook.
But the five-term congressman has voted in line with Trump 22 percent of the time, also backing the repeal of Dodd-Frank financial regulations. Foster voted present on the pro-ICE bill.
Rep. Seth Moulton (MA): 22 percent
Moulton, who represents the D+6 6th congressional district north of Boston, has been the most outspoken Democrat in opposition to Pelosi’s leadership.
The three-term congressman has supported Trump’s agenda 22 percent of the time, including the Republican omnibus bill. Moulton also voted present on the pro-ICE resolution.
Rep. Tim Ryan (OH): 21.7 percent
Ryan, who unsuccessfully challenged Pelosi for House Minority Leader after the 2016 election, is in the safe D+7 13th congressional district that contains Youngstown.
However, the nine-term congressman has supported Trump’s policies nearly 22 percent of the time, including backing the GOP omnibus bill. Ryan also voted present on the pro-ICE resolution.
Rep. Brian Higgins (NY): 20.9 percent
Higgins represents Buffalo and Niagara Falls in the 26th congressional district. Though it’s rated as a D+11 area by Cook, the district supported Trump in 2016 after backing Obama in 2012 and 2008.
The eight-term congressman has voted in line with Trump just under 21 percent of the time, including supporting “Kate’s Law” and the GOP omnibus bill. Higgins also voted present on the pro-ICE resolution.
Rep. Linda Sánchez (CA): 14.4 percent
Sánchez is the only Democrat on this list who has backed Trump’s policies less frequently than Pelosi.
The nine-term congresswoman, who represents the D+17 38th congressional district near Los Angeles, voted present on the bill to support ICE.
Per FiveThirtyEight, the current House Democrats who have been the least-supportive of Trump are New Jersey’s Bonnie Watson Coleman (6.5 percent), California’s Barbara Lee (7.7 percent), and Arizona’s Raúl Grijalva (8.6 percent).
There is one obstacle in Pelosi’s way: A much-publicized bid, mounted by a breakaway group of Democrats seeking to end Pelosi’s reign as leader of the House Democrats, a position she has held since 2003. Their effort, however, met a setback on Tuesday when Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), who was at one point put forward as this opposition group’s choice to repeal and replace Pelosi, announced she would be backing Pelosi instead.
The anti-Pelosi faction has not come up with an alternative to Fudge since the Ohio Congresswoman made her decision.
On Monday, a long-rumored letter of Democratic opposition to Pelosi, who has served in Congress since 1987, was released with the signatures of 16 House Democrats.
Of those 16, only 11 are currently serving in Congress. The remaining five include three Democrats who were just elected to the House of Representatives for the first time in the recent midterm elections, and two other Democrats hoping to join this freshman class of lawmakers, whose races had not yet been called at the time of this writing.
Of the 11 who are currently serving, 10 have voted with President Donald Trump more frequently than Pelosi, who was recently rated as one of the most progressive members of the House by Mother Jones.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s congressional Trump tracker, Pelosi has voted with the Republican president 19.3 percent of the time.
Here are how the House Democrats who oppose her stack up.
Rep. Jim Cooper (TN): 38 percent
Cooper represents the 5th congressional district that contains Nashville, a reliably Democratic D+7 area per the Cook Partisan Voting Index, which “measures how each district performs at the presidential level compared to the nation as a whole.”
Despite this, the nine-term congressman has supported Trump’s policies nearly 40 percent of the time, including backing “Kate’s Law” to increase penalties for undocumented immigrants who re-enter the U.S. and a failed push to add a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
Rep. Kurt Schrader (OR): 31.5 percent
Schrader represents the 5th congressional district on the state’s central coast, in which voters supported Trump in 2016 after backing President Barack Obama in 2012 and 2008.
The six-term congressman has voted with the GOP president almost a third of the time, including on bills to roll back financial regulations put in place after the Great Recession and make conceal-carry gun permits legal across state lines.
Rep. Stephen Lynch (MA): 30 percent
Lynch has supported Trump’s agenda almost a third of the time despite representing the 8th congressional district near Boston that favors Democrats by double-digits (D+10) in Cook’s ratings.
The nine-term congressman voted for “Kate’s Law” and the bill supporting ICE.
Rep. Kathleen Rice (NY): 28.9 percent
Rice represents the D+4 4th congressional district on Long Island. The two-term congresswoman has voted with Trump nearly 30 percent of the time.
Rice supported the effort to roll back Dodd-Frank regulations put in place after the Great Recession. She also voted present on the pro-ICE bill.
Rep. Ed Perlmutter (CO): 27.2 percent
Perlmutter’s 7th congressional district near Denver is rated as a safe D+6 area by Cook.
However, the seven-term congressman has supported Trump over a quarter of the time, including backing the GOP’s omnibus spending bill. He also voted present on the pro-ICE bill.
Rep. Filemón Vela (TX): 23.6 percent
Vela represents the heavily-Hispanic 34th congressional district that contains Corpus Christi and is rated as D+10 by Cook.
Despite this, the four-term congressman has supported Trump’s agenda nearly a quarter of the time, also backing the rollback of Dodd-Frank financial regulations.
Rep. Bill Foster (IL): 22 percent
Foster’s 11th congressional district, which includes Joliet, is rated as D+9 by Cook.
But the five-term congressman has voted in line with Trump 22 percent of the time, also backing the repeal of Dodd-Frank financial regulations. Foster voted present on the pro-ICE bill.
Rep. Seth Moulton (MA): 22 percent
Moulton, who represents the D+6 6th congressional district north of Boston, has been the most outspoken Democrat in opposition to Pelosi’s leadership.
The three-term congressman has supported Trump’s agenda 22 percent of the time, including the Republican omnibus bill. Moulton also voted present on the pro-ICE resolution.
Rep. Tim Ryan (OH): 21.7 percent
Ryan, who unsuccessfully challenged Pelosi for House Minority Leader after the 2016 election, is in the safe D+7 13th congressional district that contains Youngstown.
However, the nine-term congressman has supported Trump’s policies nearly 22 percent of the time, including backing the GOP omnibus bill. Ryan also voted present on the pro-ICE resolution.
Rep. Brian Higgins (NY): 20.9 percent
Higgins represents Buffalo and Niagara Falls in the 26th congressional district. Though it’s rated as a D+11 area by Cook, the district supported Trump in 2016 after backing Obama in 2012 and 2008.
The eight-term congressman has voted in line with Trump just under 21 percent of the time, including supporting “Kate’s Law” and the GOP omnibus bill. Higgins also voted present on the pro-ICE resolution.
Rep. Linda Sánchez (CA): 14.4 percent
Sánchez is the only Democrat on this list who has backed Trump’s policies less frequently than Pelosi.
The nine-term congresswoman, who represents the D+17 38th congressional district near Los Angeles, voted present on the bill to support ICE.
Per FiveThirtyEight, the current House Democrats who have been the least-supportive of Trump are New Jersey’s Bonnie Watson Coleman (6.5 percent), California’s Barbara Lee (7.7 percent), and Arizona’s Raúl Grijalva (8.6 percent).
The DC Centrist Democrat Spin Cycle
The votes aren’t even done being counted yet, but the classic post-election spin cycle from the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party is already in full gear. Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum are still fighting for their lives in razor-thin margin elections, but you can just feel the excitement about their losses from the Third Way types, whose public pronouncements already assume they have lost.
By Mike Lux - crooks & liars
11/12/18 8:00pm
The votes aren’t even done being counted yet, but the classic post-election spin cycle from the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party is already in full gear. Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum are still fighting for their lives in razor-thin margin elections, but you can just feel the excitement about their losses from the Third Way types, whose public pronouncements already assume they have lost.
I have seen this kind of post-election spin after every election since 1994: if Democrats have a bad year, it’s because we moved too far left. If we have a good year like this one, it’s because of the noble centrists who prevailed -- and they’ll pick over the bones of any progressive Democrat who didn’t win and point with glee saying, “See! See! They got beat!” It is especially galling given that some of these races aren’t even over. (I guess at least it’s better than actively trying to beat progressive Democrats as Third Way has been known to do over the years, like when they attacked Elizabeth Warren as being anti-business when she was in the heat of a tough 2012 Senate race to defeat popular incumbent Scott Brown.)
There’s a couple of articles out where this spin is in overdrive, here, and here. The official line is that the progressive Democrats who won primaries (defined a certain kind of way that fits the spin) didn’t win a single general election race they were involved in and didn’t turn a single Republican district to Democrat.
These kinds of spin games have to be put to rest. I think it’s important to make the following points about some of the goofy things in these articles:
1. Not all of the progressives on the Wall Street Dems’ list have lost. Gillum, along with centrist white guy Senator Bill Nelson whose number of votes and margin are almost identical, are in the midst of recounts, in case you hadn’t noticed. Two of the closest elections in Florida history, and Florida has had its share of close ones, as you may recall. Not all of the votes are counted in Georgia either, and the race might go to runoff. Not all the votes have been counted in Katie Porter’s race in California, either. Guys (because most of the people putting out this BS are indeed men), please don’t dance on the graves of these outstanding Democrats until their races are over. Progressives aren’t sitting around rooting for Kyrsten Sinema to lose because she’s a moderate.
2. The list of progressives who won primaries is a lot longer than the nine people the corporate Dems are crowing about who lost, and tons of them are winning. Brilliant progressive Xochitl Torres Small won a very Republican Congressional seat in New Mexico after winning the primary; progressive star Colin Allred won a tough primary and went on to defeat incumbent Pete Sessions in Texas; Antonio Delgado won a very tough primary in NY-19, and went on to win in a very tough rural district against incumbent John Faso; Mike Levin became the Democrat in California’s strange jungle primary system, beating several other strong Democrats and then winning in what had been the Republican House district of Darrell Issa for many years. Katie Hill in California ran on a strong progressive agenda to beat incumbent Steve Knight, winning a tough Southern California district. I’ll stop at five examples, but there are a great many more than the carefully handpicked list from the Third Way types. All of these were candidates helped in the primaries by many different progressive groups and activists. They generated enormous enthusiasm among progressive netroots donors across the country, and ran unapologetically on a strong progressive agenda in their campaigns.
3. Most of the candidates who ran in competitive races, and most who won, supported major elements of the progressive populist economic agenda. You can look it up!: most of the congressional candidates who won Republican seats supported some combination of Medicare For All or a major Medicare expansion, an expansion of Social Security benefits, a $15 minimum wage, doing something big about student debt, major new taxes on the wealthy and Wall Street banks, and/or major new initiatives on climate change. Given that the Third Way's historic agenda is cutting Social Security benefits, opposing Medicare For All, lessening regulations on Wall Street, and instituting a minimum wage much lower than $15, the incoming class of Democrats were not what you'd call a bunch of Third Way types.
4. Anyone who thinks that the typical cautious centrist campaigns of the past would have run some of these races is smoking something far more potent than marijuana. Whoever won the Democratic primary to run against Governor Larry Hogan in Maryland was almost certain to lose, as he was one of the most popular governors in the country. In Arizona, Governor Ducey was always heavily favored. In Texas, no Democrat running statewide had come anywhere near as close as Beto in 24 years, almost all losing by double digits. Florida and Georgia have not had Democratic governors in 20 years. All of those losses by progressives that the centrist Democrats are so delighted to cite (and as noted some are yet to be declared losses) were in very tough races, that most politicos considered longshots from the beginning of the cycle.
I would add that no serious political observer can make the case that duller, more centrist, white candidates could have turned out as many African-American, Latinx, or young voters as Gillum, Beto, or Abrams, who lit a fire in those communities. Democrats are not going to win in tough places like these without an incredibly high turnout of our base.
5. The centrist Democratic strategy didn't do so well in those red states. In red state Senate races where centrist Democrats worked hard to distance themselves from progressives and the party, we had a pretty lousy track record. Manchin pulled it off, but he is a pretty unique figure in modern American politics -- and he sure was unique in this election, as he was the only centrist who survived. Donnelly in Indiana, McCaskill in Missouri, and Bredesen in Tennessee all did worse than their margin-of-error polling average throughout the campaign, losing by 7, 6, and 11 points respectively. By my book, that's a lot. Meanwhile, Heitkamp in North Dakota, to whom I do give a lot of credit for bravely and strongly opposing Kavanaugh and for not giving in to the temptation to join Trump's race baiting as Donnelly and McCaskill did, nevertheless did run as a pretty centrist Democrat. She also lost by double digits, although she had not been close in the polls for a while.
Some will argue that Montana Senator Jon Tester, who won, ran as a more conservative Democrat, but I did not see it that way. Tester finds ways to emphasizes his pragmatism in getting bipartisan bills passed that Trump could sign, but he describes himself as a "Montana Democrat," someone who is proud of being a Democrat, but is tied to the culture and independence of Montana. A long-time friend of his who is from Montana told me that he even has been known to describe himself as a progressive in public from time to time. He didn't play any of the signaling games in culture-war politics that Donnelly and McCaskill did, either.
6. Tammy Baldwin and Sherrod Brown. The two Democrats who won from states that Trump won in 2016 that the Third Way types avoid talking about at all costs are Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown. Their stories in the 2018 cycle are very inconvenient for the ‘Progressives Can't Win’ narrative. They are two of the most progressive and populist people in the U.S. Senate. Both of them were initially very high on the Republican target lists for this cycle. In fact, Tammy Baldwin had more spent against her in 2017 than any other Senate incumbent. But neither of them moved to the center at all or got the least bit mealy-mouthed in voting and speaking out for progressive issues or values. They both were able to establish strong early leads and won going away.
I want to say a special word about Sherrod Brown, who has been one of my favorite senators for as long as he's been here. One of the aforementioned articles talked dismissively about Brown with his populist message only winning by six. The author made it sound like his message didn't work very well, which has to be the single dumbest thing I've read (outside of Trump quotes) since the election. First of all, a margin of six points is a pretty sizable win in any contested state, especially in a red-state like Ohio. Sherrod is the only Ohio Democrat to win a statewide race since 2006. Trump had close to a double-digit win. This year, there was a criminal justice reform ballot measure that Republicans put a lot of money into attacking that was a big drag on the Democrats running. But Sherrod Brown showed how a progressive populist message focused on working people can still win in red America.
The reason all of this is important to lay out is that the DC centrists are working hard to build the case that a progressive candidate and message cannot win the presidential race in 2020. Let me disabuse you of that misguided notion: our best chance by far is for a presidential candidate that is a strong progressive, willing to take on Wall Street, the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, Big Oil, and other big monopolistic corporations who are dominating our economy and threatening the American dream for working families. Sherrod Brown won in Ohio when no other Democrat could; Beto O'Rourke and Stacey Abrams did better than any other statewide candidates have done in a generation; strong progressives won in dozens of tough districts all over the country, and came close in many more; and Andrew Gillum is a hare's breath away from becoming the first Florida governor in a generation.
Have progressive candidates solved all the challenges of the modern era in terms of winning elections? Of course not. But the formula of genuinely reaching out to working folks of all races and religions, getting young people excited about politics again, and telling the story of how Wall Street and big monopolies need to be tamed again is a formula than is going to win us far more elections than the Third Way agenda of cuddling up to the big banks and cutting Social Security benefits. At the end of the day, what Democrats need to do is to reject the false choices that have plagued our party for the last generation: we don't have to choose between white working class and rural voters and firing up our base; we don't have to choose between advocating for fairness and advocating for economic growth. We win with a message that inspires and motivates Democrats and progressive activists and voters, and appeals to those working class and rural folks in the middle at the same damn time.
I have seen this kind of post-election spin after every election since 1994: if Democrats have a bad year, it’s because we moved too far left. If we have a good year like this one, it’s because of the noble centrists who prevailed -- and they’ll pick over the bones of any progressive Democrat who didn’t win and point with glee saying, “See! See! They got beat!” It is especially galling given that some of these races aren’t even over. (I guess at least it’s better than actively trying to beat progressive Democrats as Third Way has been known to do over the years, like when they attacked Elizabeth Warren as being anti-business when she was in the heat of a tough 2012 Senate race to defeat popular incumbent Scott Brown.)
There’s a couple of articles out where this spin is in overdrive, here, and here. The official line is that the progressive Democrats who won primaries (defined a certain kind of way that fits the spin) didn’t win a single general election race they were involved in and didn’t turn a single Republican district to Democrat.
These kinds of spin games have to be put to rest. I think it’s important to make the following points about some of the goofy things in these articles:
1. Not all of the progressives on the Wall Street Dems’ list have lost. Gillum, along with centrist white guy Senator Bill Nelson whose number of votes and margin are almost identical, are in the midst of recounts, in case you hadn’t noticed. Two of the closest elections in Florida history, and Florida has had its share of close ones, as you may recall. Not all of the votes are counted in Georgia either, and the race might go to runoff. Not all the votes have been counted in Katie Porter’s race in California, either. Guys (because most of the people putting out this BS are indeed men), please don’t dance on the graves of these outstanding Democrats until their races are over. Progressives aren’t sitting around rooting for Kyrsten Sinema to lose because she’s a moderate.
2. The list of progressives who won primaries is a lot longer than the nine people the corporate Dems are crowing about who lost, and tons of them are winning. Brilliant progressive Xochitl Torres Small won a very Republican Congressional seat in New Mexico after winning the primary; progressive star Colin Allred won a tough primary and went on to defeat incumbent Pete Sessions in Texas; Antonio Delgado won a very tough primary in NY-19, and went on to win in a very tough rural district against incumbent John Faso; Mike Levin became the Democrat in California’s strange jungle primary system, beating several other strong Democrats and then winning in what had been the Republican House district of Darrell Issa for many years. Katie Hill in California ran on a strong progressive agenda to beat incumbent Steve Knight, winning a tough Southern California district. I’ll stop at five examples, but there are a great many more than the carefully handpicked list from the Third Way types. All of these were candidates helped in the primaries by many different progressive groups and activists. They generated enormous enthusiasm among progressive netroots donors across the country, and ran unapologetically on a strong progressive agenda in their campaigns.
3. Most of the candidates who ran in competitive races, and most who won, supported major elements of the progressive populist economic agenda. You can look it up!: most of the congressional candidates who won Republican seats supported some combination of Medicare For All or a major Medicare expansion, an expansion of Social Security benefits, a $15 minimum wage, doing something big about student debt, major new taxes on the wealthy and Wall Street banks, and/or major new initiatives on climate change. Given that the Third Way's historic agenda is cutting Social Security benefits, opposing Medicare For All, lessening regulations on Wall Street, and instituting a minimum wage much lower than $15, the incoming class of Democrats were not what you'd call a bunch of Third Way types.
4. Anyone who thinks that the typical cautious centrist campaigns of the past would have run some of these races is smoking something far more potent than marijuana. Whoever won the Democratic primary to run against Governor Larry Hogan in Maryland was almost certain to lose, as he was one of the most popular governors in the country. In Arizona, Governor Ducey was always heavily favored. In Texas, no Democrat running statewide had come anywhere near as close as Beto in 24 years, almost all losing by double digits. Florida and Georgia have not had Democratic governors in 20 years. All of those losses by progressives that the centrist Democrats are so delighted to cite (and as noted some are yet to be declared losses) were in very tough races, that most politicos considered longshots from the beginning of the cycle.
I would add that no serious political observer can make the case that duller, more centrist, white candidates could have turned out as many African-American, Latinx, or young voters as Gillum, Beto, or Abrams, who lit a fire in those communities. Democrats are not going to win in tough places like these without an incredibly high turnout of our base.
5. The centrist Democratic strategy didn't do so well in those red states. In red state Senate races where centrist Democrats worked hard to distance themselves from progressives and the party, we had a pretty lousy track record. Manchin pulled it off, but he is a pretty unique figure in modern American politics -- and he sure was unique in this election, as he was the only centrist who survived. Donnelly in Indiana, McCaskill in Missouri, and Bredesen in Tennessee all did worse than their margin-of-error polling average throughout the campaign, losing by 7, 6, and 11 points respectively. By my book, that's a lot. Meanwhile, Heitkamp in North Dakota, to whom I do give a lot of credit for bravely and strongly opposing Kavanaugh and for not giving in to the temptation to join Trump's race baiting as Donnelly and McCaskill did, nevertheless did run as a pretty centrist Democrat. She also lost by double digits, although she had not been close in the polls for a while.
Some will argue that Montana Senator Jon Tester, who won, ran as a more conservative Democrat, but I did not see it that way. Tester finds ways to emphasizes his pragmatism in getting bipartisan bills passed that Trump could sign, but he describes himself as a "Montana Democrat," someone who is proud of being a Democrat, but is tied to the culture and independence of Montana. A long-time friend of his who is from Montana told me that he even has been known to describe himself as a progressive in public from time to time. He didn't play any of the signaling games in culture-war politics that Donnelly and McCaskill did, either.
6. Tammy Baldwin and Sherrod Brown. The two Democrats who won from states that Trump won in 2016 that the Third Way types avoid talking about at all costs are Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown. Their stories in the 2018 cycle are very inconvenient for the ‘Progressives Can't Win’ narrative. They are two of the most progressive and populist people in the U.S. Senate. Both of them were initially very high on the Republican target lists for this cycle. In fact, Tammy Baldwin had more spent against her in 2017 than any other Senate incumbent. But neither of them moved to the center at all or got the least bit mealy-mouthed in voting and speaking out for progressive issues or values. They both were able to establish strong early leads and won going away.
I want to say a special word about Sherrod Brown, who has been one of my favorite senators for as long as he's been here. One of the aforementioned articles talked dismissively about Brown with his populist message only winning by six. The author made it sound like his message didn't work very well, which has to be the single dumbest thing I've read (outside of Trump quotes) since the election. First of all, a margin of six points is a pretty sizable win in any contested state, especially in a red-state like Ohio. Sherrod is the only Ohio Democrat to win a statewide race since 2006. Trump had close to a double-digit win. This year, there was a criminal justice reform ballot measure that Republicans put a lot of money into attacking that was a big drag on the Democrats running. But Sherrod Brown showed how a progressive populist message focused on working people can still win in red America.
The reason all of this is important to lay out is that the DC centrists are working hard to build the case that a progressive candidate and message cannot win the presidential race in 2020. Let me disabuse you of that misguided notion: our best chance by far is for a presidential candidate that is a strong progressive, willing to take on Wall Street, the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, Big Oil, and other big monopolistic corporations who are dominating our economy and threatening the American dream for working families. Sherrod Brown won in Ohio when no other Democrat could; Beto O'Rourke and Stacey Abrams did better than any other statewide candidates have done in a generation; strong progressives won in dozens of tough districts all over the country, and came close in many more; and Andrew Gillum is a hare's breath away from becoming the first Florida governor in a generation.
Have progressive candidates solved all the challenges of the modern era in terms of winning elections? Of course not. But the formula of genuinely reaching out to working folks of all races and religions, getting young people excited about politics again, and telling the story of how Wall Street and big monopolies need to be tamed again is a formula than is going to win us far more elections than the Third Way agenda of cuddling up to the big banks and cutting Social Security benefits. At the end of the day, what Democrats need to do is to reject the false choices that have plagued our party for the last generation: we don't have to choose between white working class and rural voters and firing up our base; we don't have to choose between advocating for fairness and advocating for economic growth. We win with a message that inspires and motivates Democrats and progressive activists and voters, and appeals to those working class and rural folks in the middle at the same damn time.
MICHIGAN’S DEMOCRATIC GOVERNOR-ELECT PUTS BLUE CROSS BLUE SHIELD EXECUTIVE ON TRANSITION TEAM — AFTER THE COMPANY FUNDED HER CAMPAIGN
Zaid Jilani - the intercept
November 9 2018, 7:41 a.m.
WHEN FORMER MICHIGAN Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer faced a populist, progressive rival in the state’s Democratic gubernatorial primary earlier this year, she had a little help from her health insurance industry friends.
Whitmer was hosted at a fundraiser thrown by lobbyists for Blue Cross Blue Shield. She netted $144,000 during a single day at the event.
The company’s interest in the race came as no surprise, as Whitmer’s chief rival, former Detroit public health chief Abdul El-Sayed, was campaigning on establishing a statewide single-payer health care system. Essentially, he was running to put the company out of business.
But it appears that Blue Cross Blue Shield gained more than just the defeat of single payer. This week, Whitmer won the governor’s mansion, putting the state back in the Democratic column. She quickly announced the composition of her transition team.
One of the “honorary co-chairs” is Daniel Loepp, the president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.
In a 2015 interview, Whitmer credited Loepp with being the first person to suggest that she enter politics, back when he worked in the state legislature.
During the campaign, Gretchen Whitmer — whose father is Richard Whitmer, formerly the head of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan — was defensive against criticisms that she was too close to the health insurance giant. “It’s extremely sexist to say that a woman is beholden to her father’s former employer,” she told CNN.
The governor-elect’s team did not respond to a request for comment. Though Whitmer ran to the right of El-Sayed, her platform was still broadly progressive and pro-labor.
Whitmer’s transition team isn’t the only one bringing corporate interests onboard post-election. In Georgia, Republican Brian Kemp has declared victory, despite an ongoing legal effort by his Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams to chase down enough provisional and absentee ballots to take the race to a run-off.
Kemp announced Thursday that his transition team would be led by David Dove, Kemp’s former legal counsel and chief of staff. More recently, Dove was added to the new lobbying arm of the litigation and regulatory law firm Robbins Ross Alloy Belinfante Littlefield LLC.
The newly minted Robbins Government Relations Group opened October 2, just over a month before the election. In an interview with a legal publication, partner Josh Belinfante explained why the firm decided to open a lobbying arm. He emphasized the potential to influence regulations.
“A lot of our clients’ problems can be resolved through the legislative branch more easily and effectively than through the judicial branch,” Belinfante said. “Or our clients may have a win in the judicial branch that may need to be protected in the legislature — particularly clients who are highly regulated, and particularly when legislation or regulations pass that govern what they do.”
According to disclosures, Dove is not currently registered to lobby. But presumably, the firm’s clients now have a chain of communication to the man responsible for staffing the next governor’s mansion. The Intercept reached out to the firm and to Dove to ask if he would be taking a leave of absence while serving on the transition team, but they have not yet responded.
Whitmer was hosted at a fundraiser thrown by lobbyists for Blue Cross Blue Shield. She netted $144,000 during a single day at the event.
The company’s interest in the race came as no surprise, as Whitmer’s chief rival, former Detroit public health chief Abdul El-Sayed, was campaigning on establishing a statewide single-payer health care system. Essentially, he was running to put the company out of business.
But it appears that Blue Cross Blue Shield gained more than just the defeat of single payer. This week, Whitmer won the governor’s mansion, putting the state back in the Democratic column. She quickly announced the composition of her transition team.
One of the “honorary co-chairs” is Daniel Loepp, the president and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.
In a 2015 interview, Whitmer credited Loepp with being the first person to suggest that she enter politics, back when he worked in the state legislature.
During the campaign, Gretchen Whitmer — whose father is Richard Whitmer, formerly the head of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan — was defensive against criticisms that she was too close to the health insurance giant. “It’s extremely sexist to say that a woman is beholden to her father’s former employer,” she told CNN.
The governor-elect’s team did not respond to a request for comment. Though Whitmer ran to the right of El-Sayed, her platform was still broadly progressive and pro-labor.
Whitmer’s transition team isn’t the only one bringing corporate interests onboard post-election. In Georgia, Republican Brian Kemp has declared victory, despite an ongoing legal effort by his Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams to chase down enough provisional and absentee ballots to take the race to a run-off.
Kemp announced Thursday that his transition team would be led by David Dove, Kemp’s former legal counsel and chief of staff. More recently, Dove was added to the new lobbying arm of the litigation and regulatory law firm Robbins Ross Alloy Belinfante Littlefield LLC.
The newly minted Robbins Government Relations Group opened October 2, just over a month before the election. In an interview with a legal publication, partner Josh Belinfante explained why the firm decided to open a lobbying arm. He emphasized the potential to influence regulations.
“A lot of our clients’ problems can be resolved through the legislative branch more easily and effectively than through the judicial branch,” Belinfante said. “Or our clients may have a win in the judicial branch that may need to be protected in the legislature — particularly clients who are highly regulated, and particularly when legislation or regulations pass that govern what they do.”
According to disclosures, Dove is not currently registered to lobby. But presumably, the firm’s clients now have a chain of communication to the man responsible for staffing the next governor’s mansion. The Intercept reached out to the firm and to Dove to ask if he would be taking a leave of absence while serving on the transition team, but they have not yet responded.
Banks to target moderate Democrats, regulators if US House flips
Reuters - raw story
03 NOV 2018 AT 08:30 ET
Financial industry lobbyists say they will focus their efforts on moderate Democrats and regulatory agencies if Democrats take control of the House of Representatives after next week’s congressional elections.
The Nov. 6 vote could result in Democratic Representative Maxine Waters, a fierce bank critic, taking over as the next chair of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, which helps set the nation’s financial policy and oversight agenda.
Yet despite her rhetoric, financial lobbyists say Waters has a track record of working across the aisle and believe there are bipartisan areas on data privacy, bank secrecy and capital formation where they still hope to gain ground under her leadership.
“Congresswoman Waters has shown a streak for consensus-building throughout her career on House Financial Services, particularly on small business capital formation issues which really matter to our group,” said Chris Iacovella, chief executive of the American Securities Association, a group representing regional broker dealers.
Waters, in a statement to Reuters, said: “I look forward to continuing to work with Members on both sides of the aisle on sensible solutions to benefit hardworking Americans and strengthen our nation’s economy.”
If Democrats take the House by a thin margin, as many polls predict, their majority will rely on moderate Democrats who will want to show voters, and the industry, that they can be productive.
Financial lobbyists said they believe those lawmakers, including New York’s Carolyn Maloney, Georgia’s David Scott and Connecticut’s Jim Himes, can be influenced to push bipartisan issues.
The Financial Services Committee has long been a critical panel for lawmakers from both parties to attract campaign funds from Wall Street. Its members will not want to jeopardize that, lobbyists say, and the flow of cash has jumped this year as the industry looks to rebuild bipartisan support it enjoyed before the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
“The folks who have the most power are the moderates who will swing those votes in either direction and they will be very important in the next congress,” said Paul Merski, executive vice president at the Independent Community Bankers of America.
Congressmen Himes and Scott did not respond to requests for to comment, while Congresswoman Maloney said she wanted to remain focused on putting consumers first.
“OPEN DOOR”
Waters, 80, has served in Congress representing a Los Angeles district since 1991. With the gavel in reach, she has been quietly pushing her bipartisan credentials and is promising an “open door policy” to all parties.
Most recently, she worked with Republicans to craft a bill to help companies raise capital. She also worked across the aisle to help pass reauthorizations of the Export-Import Bank and Flood Insurance programs, which are critical for lenders and insurers.
On the Republican side, the two front-runners to lead the committee, North Carolina’s Patrick McHenry and Missouri’s Blaine Luetkemeyer, told Reuters they were prepared to collaborate with Waters.
McHenry, currently the committee’s vice chair, has previously worked with her on crowdfunding and business innovation bills, he noted in an interview.
“While we largely disagree on approach, we still have areas where we can build some consensus,” he added.
One of the more contentious areas of Waters’ anticipated agenda could be her deploying the chair’s subpoena power to step up oversight of banks, regulators and President Donald Trump personally.
Extensive documentation requests and congressional hearings could tie-up staff and slow work on the regulatory front.
But lobbyists stressed that key rule changes – involving the relaxation of stress tests, proprietary trading, derivatives and liquidity rules – were already in progress and in some cases mandated by laws Congress passed this year.
James Ballentine, chief lobbyist for the American Bankers Association, Washington’s largest bank group, said he was “realistically optimistic” about a Waters chair and did not expect the regulators’ agenda to change.
“They absolutely should take input from members of Congress. But ultimately they have to make the decision,” he said.
The Nov. 6 vote could result in Democratic Representative Maxine Waters, a fierce bank critic, taking over as the next chair of the powerful House Financial Services Committee, which helps set the nation’s financial policy and oversight agenda.
Yet despite her rhetoric, financial lobbyists say Waters has a track record of working across the aisle and believe there are bipartisan areas on data privacy, bank secrecy and capital formation where they still hope to gain ground under her leadership.
“Congresswoman Waters has shown a streak for consensus-building throughout her career on House Financial Services, particularly on small business capital formation issues which really matter to our group,” said Chris Iacovella, chief executive of the American Securities Association, a group representing regional broker dealers.
Waters, in a statement to Reuters, said: “I look forward to continuing to work with Members on both sides of the aisle on sensible solutions to benefit hardworking Americans and strengthen our nation’s economy.”
If Democrats take the House by a thin margin, as many polls predict, their majority will rely on moderate Democrats who will want to show voters, and the industry, that they can be productive.
Financial lobbyists said they believe those lawmakers, including New York’s Carolyn Maloney, Georgia’s David Scott and Connecticut’s Jim Himes, can be influenced to push bipartisan issues.
The Financial Services Committee has long been a critical panel for lawmakers from both parties to attract campaign funds from Wall Street. Its members will not want to jeopardize that, lobbyists say, and the flow of cash has jumped this year as the industry looks to rebuild bipartisan support it enjoyed before the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
“The folks who have the most power are the moderates who will swing those votes in either direction and they will be very important in the next congress,” said Paul Merski, executive vice president at the Independent Community Bankers of America.
Congressmen Himes and Scott did not respond to requests for to comment, while Congresswoman Maloney said she wanted to remain focused on putting consumers first.
“OPEN DOOR”
Waters, 80, has served in Congress representing a Los Angeles district since 1991. With the gavel in reach, she has been quietly pushing her bipartisan credentials and is promising an “open door policy” to all parties.
Most recently, she worked with Republicans to craft a bill to help companies raise capital. She also worked across the aisle to help pass reauthorizations of the Export-Import Bank and Flood Insurance programs, which are critical for lenders and insurers.
On the Republican side, the two front-runners to lead the committee, North Carolina’s Patrick McHenry and Missouri’s Blaine Luetkemeyer, told Reuters they were prepared to collaborate with Waters.
McHenry, currently the committee’s vice chair, has previously worked with her on crowdfunding and business innovation bills, he noted in an interview.
“While we largely disagree on approach, we still have areas where we can build some consensus,” he added.
One of the more contentious areas of Waters’ anticipated agenda could be her deploying the chair’s subpoena power to step up oversight of banks, regulators and President Donald Trump personally.
Extensive documentation requests and congressional hearings could tie-up staff and slow work on the regulatory front.
But lobbyists stressed that key rule changes – involving the relaxation of stress tests, proprietary trading, derivatives and liquidity rules – were already in progress and in some cases mandated by laws Congress passed this year.
James Ballentine, chief lobbyist for the American Bankers Association, Washington’s largest bank group, said he was “realistically optimistic” about a Waters chair and did not expect the regulators’ agenda to change.
“They absolutely should take input from members of Congress. But ultimately they have to make the decision,” he said.
Red-State Senate Democrats Are Top Recipients of Wall Street Donations
BY
Michael Corcoran, Truthout
PUBLISHED
November 2, 2018
Top recipients of donations from finance: Senators.
SHOT FROM CENTER FOR RESPONSIVE POLITICS
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Citi Group, which lobbied heavily for the Dodd-Frank repeal, donated more to Heidi Heitkamp than anyone else in the Senate in 2018.
CENTER FOR RESPONSIVE POLITICS
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Senate Democrats who helped roll back Obama-era financial regulations make up most of the top recipients of Wall Street donations this election cycle, according to a Truthout analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
Wall Street donors have been lavishing the Democrats in the Senate with far more money than their GOP colleagues. The top six recipients (and nine of the top 10) of Wall Street money in 2018 among senators are Democrats. Of the top 20 Senate candidates to receive donations from Wall Street this cycle, 17 are Democrats, up from six in the last midtermin 2014, and five in 2016.
The average amount collected by Senate Democrats is $895,000 vs. $368,000 for Republicans. Wall Street has donated nearly $43 million to Senate Democrats, compared with only $19 million for Republicans — a noticeable departure from typical election years, where (with one exception) donations are about even or trend Republican.
“Wall Street acts in its self-interest. [Donors] want to be friendly with whoever gets the gavel,” said Aaron Scherb, legislative director of Common Cause, in an interview with Truthout. “There are a lot of Democratic incumbents and incumbents usually win.”
There are several variables that can account for these trends, some more sinister than others: Democrats are defending many more seats and incumbents have a large financial advantage. Democrats also have been aggressive and successful in their fundraising.
Further, Wall Street is actually a little skittish about Trump: They support most of his agenda on taxes, but fear his unpredictability, complete disregard for presidential norms and his advocacy for tariffs. Many want to elect Democrats to “serve as a check” on Trump, as one Democratic fundraiser told The New York Times.
One trend that should not be ignored is that the Democrats who are getting the most money are, by and large, the ones who have embraced the Wall Street agenda during the first two years of Trump’s presidency. Seventeen Democrats helped repeal portions of Obama-era Dodd-Frank legislation by voting with Republicans on the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection bill (hereafter “Dodd-Frank repeal”).
(Note: Sen. Angus King of Maine is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. He is counted as a Democrat in this analysis)
Nine Democrats also crossed party lines to appoint Goldman Sach’s bailout attorney Jay Clayton to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission. This was despite opposition from most Democrats who lamented his connection to Goldman, whose exploitation of the 2008 economic crisis is infamous. Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of 37 Senators to oppose his confirmation, said he “embodies the greed that nearly wrecked our economy.”
The party’s dependence on Wall Street money is not new, although it is increasingly pervasive. This ongoing and growing relationship between the party and private capital raises important questions about electoral strategy, the direction of the party (especially as social democrats attempt to wrest control of it from the establishment), and the increasingly troublesome role of money in politics.
While the mainstream media do cover fundraising, they often do it to gauge a candidate’s chances. The potential impacts of political donations on policymaking are rarely discussed on cable television. These media companies themselves are owned by parent companies that benefit dramatically from this influx of cash as well — to buy influence and profit off record-breaking political advertising spending. In March, Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote an op-ed for the Guardian making a similar point:
How often has ABC, CBS or NBC discussed the role that the Koch brothers and other billionaires play in creating a political system which allows the rich and the powerful to significantly control elections and the legislative process in Congress? Sadly, the answer to these questions is: almost never. The corporate media has failed to let the American people fully understand the economic forces shaping their lives…
Wall Street’s Allies in the Democratic Party
After his inauguration, Trump promised to “do a big number” on Dodd-Frank, the law passed by Obama and the 1111th Congress in response to the economic crisis of 2008. The law attempted to lessen the amount of risk banks could take, and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is supposed to protect consumers from the products of finance, an industry fraught with bad-faith lending.
In May, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank repeal and did so with the help of 17 Senate Democrats. These “moderate” Democrats were thanked for this in ads from groups like the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity.
Citigroup, as The Intercept reported, was especially active in lobbying for the bill. Heitkamp of North Dakota received more money from Citigroup than any other Senator, followed closely by Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, both of whom voted for the repeal.
In fact, many of these Democrats did not just vote for the repeal but promoted it as a victory for bipartisanship and consumers. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp was a co-author of this bill and stood next to Trump at the signing ceremony. Heitkamp has received about $2.3 million from the industry, the fifth most of all senators, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
So proud of her role in the bill, she retweeted and republished The Wall Street Journal’s article praising the “roll back” of banking regulations as a victory for Trump and community banks.
Another name that appears at or near the top of nearly every sector in the finance industry – hedge funds, commercial banking, securities — is Claire McCaskill, a two-term senator from Missouri. She has received $4.3 million (and counting) from stock-jobbers, hedge funds, commercial banks — more than any member of (or candidate for) Congress. Her fundraising is outpacing that of her opponent in the tight Senate race in Missouri.
McCaskill voted for the Dodd-Frank repeal and was one of 10 Democratsto confirm Clayton. McCaskill released a press release saying she “helped shape” the financial repeal bill, selling the Dodd-Frank repeal vote as a win for consumers
Sen. Jon Tester of Montana is the third highest recipient of industry dollars. Goldman Sachs has given more to him than any other candidate this cycle. He also voted in lockstep with Trump and Wall Street on numerous occasions, including on the Dodd-Frank repeal and to confirm Clayton. He was rewarded for his loyalty by the American Bankers Association and the Montana Bankers Association, which together produced an ad to support his campaign.
These are just three examples of Democrats getting uncomfortably close with titans of private capital. The problem is an institutional one, however. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, for instance,has raised money from financial interests such as the Mortgage Bankers Association, the National Association of Realtors, Experian, Navient, National Venture Capital Association, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.
Among those 17 Democrats who voted to repeal Dodd-Frank, the average amount of Wall Street contributions is (as of data available on November 1, 2018) about $1.4 million, substantially more than the average Democrat ($944,500) and many times more than the average Senate Republican ($377,000). Of the 13 co-sponsors, the average is about $1.5 million.
Among the 10 Democrats who voted to confirm Jay Clayton, the Goldman bailout lawyer who Trump appointed to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the average was $1.6 million. Not a single Democrat who voted for Clayton voted against the financial regulation rollback, further demonstrating how aligned this sect of the party is on finance.
The fundraising discrepancy has frustrated the GOP. The largest Republican recipient of money from the industry is Sen. Dean Heller with $2.2 million, followed by Sen. Ted Cruz, who, with $1.6 million, is in 13th place among senators.
Despite being an incumbent, Cruz lags his challenger, Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, who has collected $3.3 million. In fact, if you expand the list of recipients to Senate candidates, the numbers are more lopsided. O’Rourke has collected more than all but four senators and the pace of his fundraising overall is record-breaking. He collected $38.1 million in one quarter.
Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, who is running a “centrist” campaign in a tight race to fill Jeff Flake’s seat in Arizona, ranks 7th with about $2.2 million in money from finance, outraising not only her opponent but every member of the GOP in Congress.
Does Wooing Wall Street Help Win Elections?
The degree to which Democrats are relying on Wall Street is worrisome and has been for a long time. While some long for the days of President Obama, people forget that he raised more money from finance than any candidate in history at the time of his first presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton’s relationship to Wall Street was a big vulnerability as well. Her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, for instance, gave her problems with the left.
When Bernie Sanders raised the issue in debates, it might have been the most visible debate about the role of money in politics in US history. Now, the debate continues to rage on.
“There’s no way that any vote in a red state or a blue state that supports Wall Street like this is a benefit at the polls,” Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America, a progressive organization that raises money for candidates, told The Hill.
Progressives cite compelling statistics from a Public Policy Polling survey from February.
“… voters strongly support regulating Wall Street, oppose [the Dodd-Frank repeal] … and are inclined to punish politicians who support the measure,” the survey said. “This issue has the potential to move votes in this fall’s midterm election. 65 percent of voters are less likely to vote for a member of Congress who supports a bill weakening oversight of many of the country’s largest banks …”
It may well be true that voting for Wall Street doesn’t endear politicians to voters. Polling shows deep distrust over Wall Street. The problem is that these politicians don’t seem to care.
Whatever damage is done by voting with Wall Street seems to be a cost these Democrats are willing to pay. Voting for Wall Street may not endear a candidate to voters, but millions of dollars in advertising and PAC money? Those can help candidates win, especially when they already have all the advantages of an incumbent in a legislative body designed to curb democracy.
Senate.gov: “Was a Senate Really Necessary?”“The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy,” Elbridge Gerry said at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, held in private with no press present among 55 wealthy elites. “The people do not want virtue but are the dupes of pretended patriots.”
It was this line of thinking that led the founders to create a body that voters could not turn over in one election (at least not more than one-third of it). In fact, initially voters did not choose senators at all; they were chosen by state legislatures until 1913 and the ratification of the 17thAmendment.
If distancing politicians from the will of the public was a goal of the founders – and it was – the Senate has proved to be an effective vehicle for that change. This helps explain why Republicans supported a Senate health care bill in 2017 that had the support of only 12 percent of the public, according to a USA Today poll. “[James] Madison clearly recognized the need for a smaller, more deliberative body in the legislative branch to cool the passions and control the urges of democratic masses,” notes the US Senate website, rather candidly. Appropriately, this essay starts off with “Was a Senate really necessary?” That is, indeed, a discussion worth having.
A Public Awakening
The good news is that Americans are more aware of these issues than ever before, Scherb said.
“In recent years, people are paying attention [to] the role of money in politics more and more,” he told Truthout. “People understand that money has too much influence.”
More than that, he says, are that more candidates are starting to shun corporate PAC money. As one PBS headline noted, there has been a recent “Rise of the Anti-PAC Democrat.” Two-thirds of Americans, according to a May 2018 Pew poll, support laws to limit money in politics. The support for these reforms is bipartisan, Pew reports.
If senators feel more pressure to court corporate donors than voters, public opinion won’t count for much. While Democrats badly want to retake Congress next session, it is worrisome that so many prospective members of the 116th Congress are so dependent on Wall Street money for political survival.
If voters and citizens wish to see this change, they will need to stop electing politicians who represent Wall Street. Only when politicians feel the sting from their shady relationship with corporate donors will they feel compelled to change.
Wall Street donors have been lavishing the Democrats in the Senate with far more money than their GOP colleagues. The top six recipients (and nine of the top 10) of Wall Street money in 2018 among senators are Democrats. Of the top 20 Senate candidates to receive donations from Wall Street this cycle, 17 are Democrats, up from six in the last midtermin 2014, and five in 2016.
The average amount collected by Senate Democrats is $895,000 vs. $368,000 for Republicans. Wall Street has donated nearly $43 million to Senate Democrats, compared with only $19 million for Republicans — a noticeable departure from typical election years, where (with one exception) donations are about even or trend Republican.
“Wall Street acts in its self-interest. [Donors] want to be friendly with whoever gets the gavel,” said Aaron Scherb, legislative director of Common Cause, in an interview with Truthout. “There are a lot of Democratic incumbents and incumbents usually win.”
There are several variables that can account for these trends, some more sinister than others: Democrats are defending many more seats and incumbents have a large financial advantage. Democrats also have been aggressive and successful in their fundraising.
Further, Wall Street is actually a little skittish about Trump: They support most of his agenda on taxes, but fear his unpredictability, complete disregard for presidential norms and his advocacy for tariffs. Many want to elect Democrats to “serve as a check” on Trump, as one Democratic fundraiser told The New York Times.
One trend that should not be ignored is that the Democrats who are getting the most money are, by and large, the ones who have embraced the Wall Street agenda during the first two years of Trump’s presidency. Seventeen Democrats helped repeal portions of Obama-era Dodd-Frank legislation by voting with Republicans on the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection bill (hereafter “Dodd-Frank repeal”).
(Note: Sen. Angus King of Maine is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. He is counted as a Democrat in this analysis)
Nine Democrats also crossed party lines to appoint Goldman Sach’s bailout attorney Jay Clayton to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission. This was despite opposition from most Democrats who lamented his connection to Goldman, whose exploitation of the 2008 economic crisis is infamous. Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of 37 Senators to oppose his confirmation, said he “embodies the greed that nearly wrecked our economy.”
The party’s dependence on Wall Street money is not new, although it is increasingly pervasive. This ongoing and growing relationship between the party and private capital raises important questions about electoral strategy, the direction of the party (especially as social democrats attempt to wrest control of it from the establishment), and the increasingly troublesome role of money in politics.
While the mainstream media do cover fundraising, they often do it to gauge a candidate’s chances. The potential impacts of political donations on policymaking are rarely discussed on cable television. These media companies themselves are owned by parent companies that benefit dramatically from this influx of cash as well — to buy influence and profit off record-breaking political advertising spending. In March, Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote an op-ed for the Guardian making a similar point:
How often has ABC, CBS or NBC discussed the role that the Koch brothers and other billionaires play in creating a political system which allows the rich and the powerful to significantly control elections and the legislative process in Congress? Sadly, the answer to these questions is: almost never. The corporate media has failed to let the American people fully understand the economic forces shaping their lives…
Wall Street’s Allies in the Democratic Party
After his inauguration, Trump promised to “do a big number” on Dodd-Frank, the law passed by Obama and the 1111th Congress in response to the economic crisis of 2008. The law attempted to lessen the amount of risk banks could take, and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is supposed to protect consumers from the products of finance, an industry fraught with bad-faith lending.
In May, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank repeal and did so with the help of 17 Senate Democrats. These “moderate” Democrats were thanked for this in ads from groups like the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity.
Citigroup, as The Intercept reported, was especially active in lobbying for the bill. Heitkamp of North Dakota received more money from Citigroup than any other Senator, followed closely by Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, both of whom voted for the repeal.
In fact, many of these Democrats did not just vote for the repeal but promoted it as a victory for bipartisanship and consumers. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp was a co-author of this bill and stood next to Trump at the signing ceremony. Heitkamp has received about $2.3 million from the industry, the fifth most of all senators, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
So proud of her role in the bill, she retweeted and republished The Wall Street Journal’s article praising the “roll back” of banking regulations as a victory for Trump and community banks.
Another name that appears at or near the top of nearly every sector in the finance industry – hedge funds, commercial banking, securities — is Claire McCaskill, a two-term senator from Missouri. She has received $4.3 million (and counting) from stock-jobbers, hedge funds, commercial banks — more than any member of (or candidate for) Congress. Her fundraising is outpacing that of her opponent in the tight Senate race in Missouri.
McCaskill voted for the Dodd-Frank repeal and was one of 10 Democratsto confirm Clayton. McCaskill released a press release saying she “helped shape” the financial repeal bill, selling the Dodd-Frank repeal vote as a win for consumers
Sen. Jon Tester of Montana is the third highest recipient of industry dollars. Goldman Sachs has given more to him than any other candidate this cycle. He also voted in lockstep with Trump and Wall Street on numerous occasions, including on the Dodd-Frank repeal and to confirm Clayton. He was rewarded for his loyalty by the American Bankers Association and the Montana Bankers Association, which together produced an ad to support his campaign.
These are just three examples of Democrats getting uncomfortably close with titans of private capital. The problem is an institutional one, however. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, for instance,has raised money from financial interests such as the Mortgage Bankers Association, the National Association of Realtors, Experian, Navient, National Venture Capital Association, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.
Among those 17 Democrats who voted to repeal Dodd-Frank, the average amount of Wall Street contributions is (as of data available on November 1, 2018) about $1.4 million, substantially more than the average Democrat ($944,500) and many times more than the average Senate Republican ($377,000). Of the 13 co-sponsors, the average is about $1.5 million.
Among the 10 Democrats who voted to confirm Jay Clayton, the Goldman bailout lawyer who Trump appointed to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the average was $1.6 million. Not a single Democrat who voted for Clayton voted against the financial regulation rollback, further demonstrating how aligned this sect of the party is on finance.
The fundraising discrepancy has frustrated the GOP. The largest Republican recipient of money from the industry is Sen. Dean Heller with $2.2 million, followed by Sen. Ted Cruz, who, with $1.6 million, is in 13th place among senators.
Despite being an incumbent, Cruz lags his challenger, Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, who has collected $3.3 million. In fact, if you expand the list of recipients to Senate candidates, the numbers are more lopsided. O’Rourke has collected more than all but four senators and the pace of his fundraising overall is record-breaking. He collected $38.1 million in one quarter.
Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, who is running a “centrist” campaign in a tight race to fill Jeff Flake’s seat in Arizona, ranks 7th with about $2.2 million in money from finance, outraising not only her opponent but every member of the GOP in Congress.
Does Wooing Wall Street Help Win Elections?
The degree to which Democrats are relying on Wall Street is worrisome and has been for a long time. While some long for the days of President Obama, people forget that he raised more money from finance than any candidate in history at the time of his first presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton’s relationship to Wall Street was a big vulnerability as well. Her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, for instance, gave her problems with the left.
When Bernie Sanders raised the issue in debates, it might have been the most visible debate about the role of money in politics in US history. Now, the debate continues to rage on.
“There’s no way that any vote in a red state or a blue state that supports Wall Street like this is a benefit at the polls,” Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America, a progressive organization that raises money for candidates, told The Hill.
Progressives cite compelling statistics from a Public Policy Polling survey from February.
“… voters strongly support regulating Wall Street, oppose [the Dodd-Frank repeal] … and are inclined to punish politicians who support the measure,” the survey said. “This issue has the potential to move votes in this fall’s midterm election. 65 percent of voters are less likely to vote for a member of Congress who supports a bill weakening oversight of many of the country’s largest banks …”
It may well be true that voting for Wall Street doesn’t endear politicians to voters. Polling shows deep distrust over Wall Street. The problem is that these politicians don’t seem to care.
Whatever damage is done by voting with Wall Street seems to be a cost these Democrats are willing to pay. Voting for Wall Street may not endear a candidate to voters, but millions of dollars in advertising and PAC money? Those can help candidates win, especially when they already have all the advantages of an incumbent in a legislative body designed to curb democracy.
Senate.gov: “Was a Senate Really Necessary?”“The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy,” Elbridge Gerry said at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, held in private with no press present among 55 wealthy elites. “The people do not want virtue but are the dupes of pretended patriots.”
It was this line of thinking that led the founders to create a body that voters could not turn over in one election (at least not more than one-third of it). In fact, initially voters did not choose senators at all; they were chosen by state legislatures until 1913 and the ratification of the 17thAmendment.
If distancing politicians from the will of the public was a goal of the founders – and it was – the Senate has proved to be an effective vehicle for that change. This helps explain why Republicans supported a Senate health care bill in 2017 that had the support of only 12 percent of the public, according to a USA Today poll. “[James] Madison clearly recognized the need for a smaller, more deliberative body in the legislative branch to cool the passions and control the urges of democratic masses,” notes the US Senate website, rather candidly. Appropriately, this essay starts off with “Was a Senate really necessary?” That is, indeed, a discussion worth having.
A Public Awakening
The good news is that Americans are more aware of these issues than ever before, Scherb said.
“In recent years, people are paying attention [to] the role of money in politics more and more,” he told Truthout. “People understand that money has too much influence.”
More than that, he says, are that more candidates are starting to shun corporate PAC money. As one PBS headline noted, there has been a recent “Rise of the Anti-PAC Democrat.” Two-thirds of Americans, according to a May 2018 Pew poll, support laws to limit money in politics. The support for these reforms is bipartisan, Pew reports.
If senators feel more pressure to court corporate donors than voters, public opinion won’t count for much. While Democrats badly want to retake Congress next session, it is worrisome that so many prospective members of the 116th Congress are so dependent on Wall Street money for political survival.
If voters and citizens wish to see this change, they will need to stop electing politicians who represent Wall Street. Only when politicians feel the sting from their shady relationship with corporate donors will they feel compelled to change.
Demo Sellouts are reliable votes!!!
third way and corporate democrats
anti-aca democrats
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