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Sellouts
the enemy within
repugnants, Neo-liberals, Dinos, and corporate Boot-lickers
january 16, 2019
Sellouts
*Kirsten Gillibrand is looking toward the future. Is she ready to face her past?
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*VIRGINIA STATE BOARD APPROVES PERMIT FOR PIPELINE STATION IN HISTORIC AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY
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*Centrist Democrats who lost now want to lecture progressives on how to win
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*Beto O’Rourke frequently voted for Republican legislation, analysis reveals
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*EMAILS SHOW POLITICAL GROUP NO LABELS GAVE WORK TO FIRMS LINKED TO FOUNDER’S HUSBAND
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*REVEALED: MUELLER-BASHING DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST MARK PENN WAS ON TRUMP’S PAYROLL
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*Joe Manchin Will Be the Top Democrat on the Energy Committee
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*'What a Despicable Sham'
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*Under No Labels' veneer of bipartisan civility, it's pretty much all about corporate grift
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*PRO-CHARTER SCHOOL DEMOCRATS, EMBATTLED IN THE TRUMP ERA, SCORE A WIN WITH HAKEEM JEFFRIES
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*WHO’S THE MYSTERY MAN BEHIND THE LATEST PELOSI PUTSCH? IT’S MARK PENN.
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*‘No Labels’ spent $2.5 million against House Democratic majority, now wants veto on their leadership
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*These Democrats are working with Republicans to possibly block Pelosi’s House Speaker bid
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*Hillary Clinton: Europe must curb immigration to stop rightwing populists
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*Over 90% of the anti-Pelosi Democrats have voted with Trump more often than Pelosi
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*Who's Really Leading the Democratic Rebellion Against Pelosi?
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*Chuck Schumer Caved to Facebook and Donald Trump. He Shouldn’t Lead Senate Democrats.
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*The DC Centrist Democrat Spin Cycle
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*DEMOCRATS WHO VOTED TO DEREGULATE WALL STREET GOT WIPED OUT IN A SETBACK FOR BANK LOBBYISTS
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*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
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*Red-State Senate Democrats Are Top Recipients of Wall Street Donations
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cartoons(at the end)
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.
REVEALED: Mueller-bashing Democratic strategist Mark Penn was on Trump’s payroll
Tana Ganeva - raw story
17 DEC 2018 AT 10:49 ET
Former Clinton strategist Mark Penn has vocally defended President Donald Trump this year.
In a piece published Monday, the Daily Beast traces the two men’s relationship all the way back to three decades before Trump ascended to the presidency, when he was trying to build a massive development dubbed Trump City on the Upper West Side in New York City.
According to the Daily Beast local activists opposed the development, 150-story commercial and residential project. So Trump turned to the polling firm Penn & Schoen Associates, headed my Mark Penn.
The Beast notes that in his multiple media appearances and platforms—during which he often defends Trump—Penn is always identified through his association with the Clintons. In a statement, Penn denied that his financial links to Trump have anything to do with his support.
“Thirty years ago, [my partner] Doug Schoen brought in Trump and the Trump organization as a minor client to a firm neither of us has been associated with for nearly a decade. I never met his then client, Donald Trump, and, as I recall, Schoen had trouble collecting payment for his work, and had to settle largely for shuttle tickets that then became worthless,” Penn said.
“Resurfacing this old news is a off-base attempt to find some irrelevant link from 30 years ago to work I didn’t do for a firm I’m no longer with, and that is not in any way related to my positions against independent counsels or as a moderate Democrat that have been consistent for over 40 years.”
But “Trump City” wasn’t the only link between the firm and Donald Trump. In 1988, they also did a survey testing Trump’s name recognition among Republican voters, finding it very high.
In a piece published Monday, the Daily Beast traces the two men’s relationship all the way back to three decades before Trump ascended to the presidency, when he was trying to build a massive development dubbed Trump City on the Upper West Side in New York City.
According to the Daily Beast local activists opposed the development, 150-story commercial and residential project. So Trump turned to the polling firm Penn & Schoen Associates, headed my Mark Penn.
The Beast notes that in his multiple media appearances and platforms—during which he often defends Trump—Penn is always identified through his association with the Clintons. In a statement, Penn denied that his financial links to Trump have anything to do with his support.
“Thirty years ago, [my partner] Doug Schoen brought in Trump and the Trump organization as a minor client to a firm neither of us has been associated with for nearly a decade. I never met his then client, Donald Trump, and, as I recall, Schoen had trouble collecting payment for his work, and had to settle largely for shuttle tickets that then became worthless,” Penn said.
“Resurfacing this old news is a off-base attempt to find some irrelevant link from 30 years ago to work I didn’t do for a firm I’m no longer with, and that is not in any way related to my positions against independent counsels or as a moderate Democrat that have been consistent for over 40 years.”
But “Trump City” wasn’t the only link between the firm and Donald Trump. In 1988, they also did a survey testing Trump’s name recognition among Republican voters, finding it very high.
the saboteur is in place!!!
Joe Manchin Will Be the Top Democrat on the Energy Committee
The pro-coal senator once shot a bullet through a cap-and-trade bill.
REBECCA LEBER AND DAN SPINELLI - mother jones
DECEMBER 12, 2018 2:19 PM
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer released a list of committee assignments Tuesday that brought bad news for environmental activists: Joe Manchin, the pro-coal West Virginia senator who narrowly held onto his deep-red seat this November, will now be the highest-ranking Democrat on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
In his new role, Manchin isn’t likely to be a strong advocate for reining in fossil fuel use to combat climate change; he once went so far as to shoot a bullet through Democrats’ failed cap-and-trade legislation in a campaign ad. While Manchin does say we “have the responsibility and capability to address” climate change, he has taken nearly $750,000 in donations from the mining industry and more than $419,000 from the oil and gas industry during his Senate campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
“The problems facing our country are serious, and I am committed to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to find common sense solutions for long-term comprehensive energy policy that incorporates an all-of-the-above strategy and ensures our state and our nation are leaders in the energy future,” Manchin said in a statement on his promotion.
Energy and Natural Resources isn’t the primary committee dealing with climate change and environmental oversight (that would be Environment and Public Works) or comprehensive climate legislation (either EPW or Finance). But it still plays an important role in overseeing public lands, energy infrastructure, and the electrical grid. While strong climate action is a nonstarter in the Republican-controlled Senate, the ranking member can set the agenda for messaging and investigations—duties that will become even more important if Democrats manage to take control of the chamber in 2020 and Manchin assumes the chairmanship.
Supporters of climate action aren’t happy about Manchin’s ascension.
“I have concerns, and that’s why I say that our issues are not just left and right, but that they’re top and down,” incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said at a press conference a few weeks ago outside the Capitol. “I have concerns over the senator’s chairmanship just because I do not believe that we should be financed by the industries that we are supposed to be legislating and regulating and touching with our legislation.”
Climate activist Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, tweeted: “Truly depressing, at a key moment in earth history, to see Joe Manchin take over as ranking member on the Energy Committee.” McKibben’s group was one of the climate advocacy groups targeting Schumer with protests in an attempt to convince him to disregard Senate tradition and choose someone else.
In a system where senators are promoted based on seniority, it’s relatively surprising that the eight-year senator was next in line for ranking member after Washington state’s Maria Cantwell, the current top Democrat, moved to replace departing Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) on the Commerce, Science, and Transportation panel.
Three other senators could have claimed the post, including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), but they wanted to keep their ranking slots on the Finance and Agriculture committees, respectively. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, chose to keep his post as the ranking member of the Budget Committee. Sanders is a 2020 presidential hopeful who plans to stake out an aggressive position on climate change. At a recent town hall, he described global warming as an urgent problem. “This is a crisis situation,” he said. “It is unprecedented, and we’ve got to act in an unprecedented way.” His staff argues that the Budget Committee can play a key role in climate legislation through the reconciliation process, which could allow a future Democratic majority to avoid a Republican filibuster.
When Manchin’s elevation appeared inevitable late last month, advocacy groups and two prominent possible Democratic presidential candidates questioned the West Virginia senator’s commitment to a progressive environmental agenda.
Jay Inslee, the Washington governor who has made climate change a major plank of his likely 2020 bid, excoriated Manchin last week for backing “Donald Trump’s dirty energy agenda.”
In a statement following the senator’s promotion, Inslee said Manchin “cannot effectively lead our party’s energy policy.”
“Senator Manchin and I have spoken on this subject, and I expressed to him my expectation that now he and all Senate Democrats must hold the line against Donald Trump’s dangerous environmental policies,” Inslee added.
Billionaire megadonor Tom Steyer, who trailed only Sheldon Adelson and Michael Bloomberg among this election cycle’s top givers, had also called on Democrats to pursue “a bold, positive path forward” on climate change—one that pointedly does not include Manchin. “Senator Manchin does not offer that vision and should not be the Democratic leader on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee,” Steyer said in a statement last week.
The intra-party feud has done little to undermine Manchin’s support among Senate Democrats. “He may be the ranking member, but he’s part of a team when it comes to issues of climate change, issues of the environment,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told Politico last Thursday. “I have a lot of confidence I can work with him to fight for a far more aggressive agenda for dealing with the planetary crisis of global warming.”
In his new role, Manchin isn’t likely to be a strong advocate for reining in fossil fuel use to combat climate change; he once went so far as to shoot a bullet through Democrats’ failed cap-and-trade legislation in a campaign ad. While Manchin does say we “have the responsibility and capability to address” climate change, he has taken nearly $750,000 in donations from the mining industry and more than $419,000 from the oil and gas industry during his Senate campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
“The problems facing our country are serious, and I am committed to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to find common sense solutions for long-term comprehensive energy policy that incorporates an all-of-the-above strategy and ensures our state and our nation are leaders in the energy future,” Manchin said in a statement on his promotion.
Energy and Natural Resources isn’t the primary committee dealing with climate change and environmental oversight (that would be Environment and Public Works) or comprehensive climate legislation (either EPW or Finance). But it still plays an important role in overseeing public lands, energy infrastructure, and the electrical grid. While strong climate action is a nonstarter in the Republican-controlled Senate, the ranking member can set the agenda for messaging and investigations—duties that will become even more important if Democrats manage to take control of the chamber in 2020 and Manchin assumes the chairmanship.
Supporters of climate action aren’t happy about Manchin’s ascension.
“I have concerns, and that’s why I say that our issues are not just left and right, but that they’re top and down,” incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said at a press conference a few weeks ago outside the Capitol. “I have concerns over the senator’s chairmanship just because I do not believe that we should be financed by the industries that we are supposed to be legislating and regulating and touching with our legislation.”
Climate activist Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, tweeted: “Truly depressing, at a key moment in earth history, to see Joe Manchin take over as ranking member on the Energy Committee.” McKibben’s group was one of the climate advocacy groups targeting Schumer with protests in an attempt to convince him to disregard Senate tradition and choose someone else.
In a system where senators are promoted based on seniority, it’s relatively surprising that the eight-year senator was next in line for ranking member after Washington state’s Maria Cantwell, the current top Democrat, moved to replace departing Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) on the Commerce, Science, and Transportation panel.
Three other senators could have claimed the post, including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), but they wanted to keep their ranking slots on the Finance and Agriculture committees, respectively. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, chose to keep his post as the ranking member of the Budget Committee. Sanders is a 2020 presidential hopeful who plans to stake out an aggressive position on climate change. At a recent town hall, he described global warming as an urgent problem. “This is a crisis situation,” he said. “It is unprecedented, and we’ve got to act in an unprecedented way.” His staff argues that the Budget Committee can play a key role in climate legislation through the reconciliation process, which could allow a future Democratic majority to avoid a Republican filibuster.
When Manchin’s elevation appeared inevitable late last month, advocacy groups and two prominent possible Democratic presidential candidates questioned the West Virginia senator’s commitment to a progressive environmental agenda.
Jay Inslee, the Washington governor who has made climate change a major plank of his likely 2020 bid, excoriated Manchin last week for backing “Donald Trump’s dirty energy agenda.”
In a statement following the senator’s promotion, Inslee said Manchin “cannot effectively lead our party’s energy policy.”
“Senator Manchin and I have spoken on this subject, and I expressed to him my expectation that now he and all Senate Democrats must hold the line against Donald Trump’s dangerous environmental policies,” Inslee added.
Billionaire megadonor Tom Steyer, who trailed only Sheldon Adelson and Michael Bloomberg among this election cycle’s top givers, had also called on Democrats to pursue “a bold, positive path forward” on climate change—one that pointedly does not include Manchin. “Senator Manchin does not offer that vision and should not be the Democratic leader on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee,” Steyer said in a statement last week.
The intra-party feud has done little to undermine Manchin’s support among Senate Democrats. “He may be the ranking member, but he’s part of a team when it comes to issues of climate change, issues of the environment,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told Politico last Thursday. “I have a lot of confidence I can work with him to fight for a far more aggressive agenda for dealing with the planetary crisis of global warming.”
'What a Despicable Sham': MSNBC's Chris Hayes Denounces Five House Democrats as 'Cowards' for Helping GOP to
Block Yemen Vote
"What the hell is the point of Congress? Why are we starving children?" asked the outraged cable news anchor. "Someone make some affirmative argument for the policy, if you think it's so important to continue killing children. But to kill the possibility of a vote in the rules committee? Cowards."
by Jon Queally, staff writer
Published on
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
by Common Dreams
While a vote in the U.S. Senate to push forward a War Powers Resolution on Wednesday resulted in applause from peace advocates and critics of U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led assault on Yemen, five Democrats in the U.S. House stirred outrage as they helped Republicans in the chamber pass a rule—attached to massive Farm Bill legislation—that effectively killed the hopes of voting on its version of the resolution for the remainder of the congressional session.
The procedural vote in the Senate, said resolution co-sponsor Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), will help send a message to the world that the chamber will soon end its support for "this brutal, horrific war in Yemen led by an undemocratic, despotic regime."
But in the House, say critics, the five Democrats—Reps. Jim Costa (Calif.), Al Lawson (Fla.), Collin Peterson (Minn.), Dutch Rupperberger (Md.), and David Scott (Ga.)—sent the exact opposite message by backing the GOP-led effort to kill the resolution.
MSNBC's Chris Hayes was just one of the journalists and other experts following the story who expressed outrage about the House vote.
"There is literally no domestic constituency of actual voters who are agitating for the U.S. to continue facilitating the bombardment and starvation of Yemen," Hayes tweeted. He added, "What a despicable sham."
The Washington Post's Jeff Stein reported that after the vote it was the "angriest at leadership I've seen progressive House aides and members in a long time." And with the final vote 206-203—a margin where the Democratic votes made the crucial difference—one of those aides told him that was "not a coincidence."
Stein asked Rep. Peterson directly why he voted the way he did, to which the congressman responded, in part: "I don't know a damn thing about" the war in Yemen but dismissed the resolution to end U.S. complicity in the world's worst humanitarian disaster as an off-topic "tangent."
"Just to be extremely clear about what happened here," explained Stein in a separate tweet: "The farm bill was going to pass regardless of the outcome of this vote. In other words, these 5 Democrats could have voted both for the farm bill and against blocking a vote on Yemen. It's not like they were incompatible."
Paul Kawika Martin, senior director for policy and political affairs for Peace Action, said Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, his fellow Republicans, and the five Democrats who voted with them "are condemning more Yemeni civilians to die horrible deaths, and condemning our nation as a democracy in name only. History will not look kindly on those who abdicated their constitutional duty to debate and vote our nation's wars in the name of petty politics and shoring up future campaign contributions from the arms industry and pro-Saudi lobbyists."
The procedural vote in the Senate, said resolution co-sponsor Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), will help send a message to the world that the chamber will soon end its support for "this brutal, horrific war in Yemen led by an undemocratic, despotic regime."
But in the House, say critics, the five Democrats—Reps. Jim Costa (Calif.), Al Lawson (Fla.), Collin Peterson (Minn.), Dutch Rupperberger (Md.), and David Scott (Ga.)—sent the exact opposite message by backing the GOP-led effort to kill the resolution.
MSNBC's Chris Hayes was just one of the journalists and other experts following the story who expressed outrage about the House vote.
"There is literally no domestic constituency of actual voters who are agitating for the U.S. to continue facilitating the bombardment and starvation of Yemen," Hayes tweeted. He added, "What a despicable sham."
The Washington Post's Jeff Stein reported that after the vote it was the "angriest at leadership I've seen progressive House aides and members in a long time." And with the final vote 206-203—a margin where the Democratic votes made the crucial difference—one of those aides told him that was "not a coincidence."
Stein asked Rep. Peterson directly why he voted the way he did, to which the congressman responded, in part: "I don't know a damn thing about" the war in Yemen but dismissed the resolution to end U.S. complicity in the world's worst humanitarian disaster as an off-topic "tangent."
"Just to be extremely clear about what happened here," explained Stein in a separate tweet: "The farm bill was going to pass regardless of the outcome of this vote. In other words, these 5 Democrats could have voted both for the farm bill and against blocking a vote on Yemen. It's not like they were incompatible."
Paul Kawika Martin, senior director for policy and political affairs for Peace Action, said Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, his fellow Republicans, and the five Democrats who voted with them "are condemning more Yemeni civilians to die horrible deaths, and condemning our nation as a democracy in name only. History will not look kindly on those who abdicated their constitutional duty to debate and vote our nation's wars in the name of petty politics and shoring up future campaign contributions from the arms industry and pro-Saudi lobbyists."
Under No Labels' veneer of bipartisan civility, it's pretty much all about corporate grift
Joan McCarter
Daily Kos Staff
Monday December 03, 2018 · 10:26 AM PST
The latest rebellion that House Speaker-Designate Nancy Pelosi has had to contend with comes from the so-called "Problem Solvers" caucus, a bipartisan group which has presumably solved only one problem: deciding which members of Congress are most deserving of being pantsed in public. (It might be a tie with the Freedom Caucus. Maybe.) That the Problem Solvers are the brain child of No Labels, a creation of Nancy Jacobsen with an apparent assist from her husband Mark Penn, tells you a lot.
What tells you everything is where the money for the whole thing comes from. The Daily Beast has done the digging, and finds that the group has "encouraged financiers known for backing hyperpartisan causes to back its own super PACs." Those hyperpartisans are also the huge money behind the Republican Party, "including David Koch, former AIG head Hank Greenberg, and billionaire hedge-fund manager Paul Singer; as well as top supporters of President Donald Trump, including PayPal founder Peter Thiel, businessman Foster Friess, and Home Depot founder Ken Langone."
No wonder Trump was named one of the Problem Solvers during the presidential primaries. To be fair, they've also tried to recruit one of George Soros' political advisers, Michael Vachon, and investor Reid Hoffman, who hates Trump. Beyond them there are people like Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, huge egos looking for any political movement from anywhere to give them the credibility to keep talking about them as potential presidential candidates. But they've had their real luck with the big corporate guys, the ones who really prefer Republicans to win, but will look for a few pet Democrats to give them bipartisan cover.
In the 2018 cycle, six Super PACs that are affiliated to No Labels raised more than $11 million from just 53 individuals, with an average contribution of around $124,000. So, yeah, not a particularly grassroots kind of venture there. It's not like they're trying that hard to appear bipartisan, either. Here's where Jacobsen (who also was there at the founding of Third Way, which Third Way really doesn't want you to remember) comes in. At one point in the Trumpcare fight, she turned the group's Twitter over to Penn for this gem in two parts: "The freedom caucus may overplay its hand and wind up empty handed. Perhaps their intransigence will force a bipartisan approach. The Democrats missed their chance to shape healthcare and let the Freedom Caucus be the key swing actor. Time to get off the sidelines."
Yep, there's No Labels telling Democrat they "missed their chance" when the Democratic Affordable Care Act is the thing Republicans are trying to destroy. Being the "key swing actor" in this case means playing nice with Republicans while they tear down Obamacare. All in the name of bipartisanship, of course. After that, backlash caused Jacobsen to take the Twitter keys away from Penn, but the damage was done. It didn't help matters that Jacobsen lobbied to make Pelosi the villain of the 2018 cycleand "flirted with supporting a general-election challenger to Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) after he said something regarded as offensive about the No Labels-affiliated Problem Solvers' caucus."
There's nothing even remotely approaching principles behind Jacobsen and No Labels. It's all about raising money from big corporate interests in order to advance big corporate interests in order to somehow remain politically relevant. To that end, they're now trying to court newly-elected Utah Sen. Mitt Romney. Sounds like it's right up his alley.
But that there are Democrats currently serving in Congress (while Problem Solver Trump is in the Oval Office) who are falling for this bullshit and even willing to pick public fights with Pelosi over it is remarkable. It does however solve one more problem besides who to pants: who to primary in 2020.
What tells you everything is where the money for the whole thing comes from. The Daily Beast has done the digging, and finds that the group has "encouraged financiers known for backing hyperpartisan causes to back its own super PACs." Those hyperpartisans are also the huge money behind the Republican Party, "including David Koch, former AIG head Hank Greenberg, and billionaire hedge-fund manager Paul Singer; as well as top supporters of President Donald Trump, including PayPal founder Peter Thiel, businessman Foster Friess, and Home Depot founder Ken Langone."
No wonder Trump was named one of the Problem Solvers during the presidential primaries. To be fair, they've also tried to recruit one of George Soros' political advisers, Michael Vachon, and investor Reid Hoffman, who hates Trump. Beyond them there are people like Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, huge egos looking for any political movement from anywhere to give them the credibility to keep talking about them as potential presidential candidates. But they've had their real luck with the big corporate guys, the ones who really prefer Republicans to win, but will look for a few pet Democrats to give them bipartisan cover.
In the 2018 cycle, six Super PACs that are affiliated to No Labels raised more than $11 million from just 53 individuals, with an average contribution of around $124,000. So, yeah, not a particularly grassroots kind of venture there. It's not like they're trying that hard to appear bipartisan, either. Here's where Jacobsen (who also was there at the founding of Third Way, which Third Way really doesn't want you to remember) comes in. At one point in the Trumpcare fight, she turned the group's Twitter over to Penn for this gem in two parts: "The freedom caucus may overplay its hand and wind up empty handed. Perhaps their intransigence will force a bipartisan approach. The Democrats missed their chance to shape healthcare and let the Freedom Caucus be the key swing actor. Time to get off the sidelines."
Yep, there's No Labels telling Democrat they "missed their chance" when the Democratic Affordable Care Act is the thing Republicans are trying to destroy. Being the "key swing actor" in this case means playing nice with Republicans while they tear down Obamacare. All in the name of bipartisanship, of course. After that, backlash caused Jacobsen to take the Twitter keys away from Penn, but the damage was done. It didn't help matters that Jacobsen lobbied to make Pelosi the villain of the 2018 cycleand "flirted with supporting a general-election challenger to Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) after he said something regarded as offensive about the No Labels-affiliated Problem Solvers' caucus."
There's nothing even remotely approaching principles behind Jacobsen and No Labels. It's all about raising money from big corporate interests in order to advance big corporate interests in order to somehow remain politically relevant. To that end, they're now trying to court newly-elected Utah Sen. Mitt Romney. Sounds like it's right up his alley.
But that there are Democrats currently serving in Congress (while Problem Solver Trump is in the Oval Office) who are falling for this bullshit and even willing to pick public fights with Pelosi over it is remarkable. It does however solve one more problem besides who to pants: who to primary in 2020.
PRO-CHARTER SCHOOL DEMOCRATS, EMBATTLED IN THE TRUMP ERA, SCORE A WIN WITH HAKEEM JEFFRIES
Rachel M. Cohen - the intercept
November 30 2018, 9:43 a.m.
HAKEEM JEFFRIES’S VICTORY in the race for Democratic House caucus chair on Wednesday was a loss for progressive groups that rallied against him, but it was a victory for one national group in particular: Democrats for Education Reform, or DFER — a political action committee that funds candidates supportive of charter schools and is critical of teachers unions. DFER was founded in 2005 by a number of Wall Street leaders, with the mission, as co-founder Whitney Tilson explained it, “to break the teacher unions’ stranglehold over the Democratic Party.”
While DFER really began to flex its financial muscles in 2008 — when it raised about $2 million to help elect pro-charter candidates — its earlier work focused primarily on New York. There, the group helped elect Hakeem Jeffries to the New York State Assembly in 2006. (He served in the state Legislature from 2007 to 2012.) In 2007, DFER also helped lobby New York legislators to lift the state’s charter school cap, increasing it from 150 schools to 250. In 2010, Jeffries co-sponsored legislation to raise the state’s charter cap even further, to 460 — where it stands today.
Over the years, Jeffries has become one of DFER’s top candidates. In 2012, when Jeffries announced that he would run for Congress, the group rallied behind him, elevating him to its so-called DFER Hot List. No other Democrat received more in direct DFER contributions that cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Though Jeffries has long been close to DFER, he’s rejected money from other school reform advocacy groups. In 2012, he turned down funds from a new group called StudentsFirstNY which offered him a six-figure contribution in the form of an independent expenditure.
“The Jeffries campaign does not believe that independent expenditures have a place in this race,” his campaign spokesperson said at the time. “We did not seek it, do not want it, and will win without it. Those involved with the proposed independent expenditure should refrain from involvement in this race and respect the candidate’s strong belief that unregulated money has no place in the political discourse.”
Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Jeffries did not respond to questions on Jeffries’s relationship with DFER, his plans for education reform advocacy as caucus chair, and his current views on independent expenditures.
Jeffries “embodies the Obama education agenda we support: greater investments in public education; strong standards to ensure our children are ready for the global economy; and diverse, high quality public school options for our parents to choose from,” DFER president Shavar Jeffries told The Intercept. (The two Jeffries are not confirmed blood relatives, but identify as cousins.)
“Alongside the election of reform-supporting governors and state and local officials around the county,” Shavar Jeffries continued, “his ascendancy into greater leadership in the House signals that the Obama reform agenda remains strong.”
While in Congress, Jeffries has stayed close to the charter movement. He’s spoken at fundraisers for Success Academy, the prominent New York City charter network, and in 2016 was the keynote speaker for a large pro-charter rally, organized to pressure Mayor Bill de Blasio to expand charters in New York City.
De Blasio has been critical of the publicly funded, privately managed schools. For a while, there were rumblings that Jeffries could mount a charter school-backed challenge to de Blasio’s 2017 re-election, something he did not immediately rule out at the time. “My inclination remains to remain in Washington. … However all options are on the table and I am going to take a hard look at where I can make a difference in the next few years,” he told Politico in 2016. (Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of Success Academy, also considered a pro-charter challenge to de Blasio for mayor, but decided to remain on her perch to influence education reform politics nationally.)
Jeffries has been called the “Barack Obama of Brooklyn,” in part for his education policy stances, as Obama was also an early DFER-backed candidate. DFER is credited with derailing Linda Darling-Hammond’s bid for education secretary in the Obama administration.
Darling-Hammond is a progressive education policy expert who has positive relationships with teachers unions. As education journalist Dana Goldstein reported in 2009:
In recent months, DFER has had a number of high-profile successes, chief among them a highly coordinated media campaign to call into question the work of Obama education adviser Linda Darling-Hammond, once considered a top contender for the job of education secretary. During the same week in early December, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe published editorials or op-eds based on DFER’s anti-Darling-Hammond talking points, which focused on the Stanford professor’s criticisms of Teach for America and other alternative-certification programs for teachers. Less than two weeks later, Obama appointed DFER’s choice to the Education Department post, Chicago schools CEO [Arne] Duncan.
DFER, and education reform generally, has traditionally been linked to affluent white collar industries like tech and — especially in New York — finance. For example, when Moskowitz, a DFER supporter, published a memoir in 2017, she urged her readers to approach income inequality “delicately in an age when hedge fund managers can work anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.” She scolded de Blasio’s “class-warfare rhetoric” as “imprudent and dangerous.” The financial sector has contributed substantially to Jeffries’s political campaigns.
POLITICS WITHIN BOTH the Democratic Party and the national electorate, however, have changed since 2009, and DFER’s strategies of opposing teachers unions and raising money from the super wealthy have grown more controversial. As progressives have embraced a sharper critique of Wall Street and economic inequality, and as organized labor continues to battle escalating attacks from right-wing interest groups and a hostile judicial system, an anti-union message from Wall Street Democrats has grown considerably less popular.
It was clear, even before Trump won the presidency in 2016, that Democratic elected officials were facing greater pressure to balance their support for charters, a favored cause of many of their donors, with growing public skepticism of the schools. In 2016, candidates like Hillary Clinton and elected officials like Jeffries himself maintained their vocal support for charters but began articulating their opposition to for-profit charter schools, a small but politically powerful segment of the movement. (Kevin Chavous, a co-founder of DFER and a former board chair for the organization, now serves as president of academics, policy and schools for K12 Inc., a national for-profit charter school company.) Democrats also explicitly spelled out opposition to for-profit charters for the first time in their 2016 party platform.
Education reform Democrats suffered a significant loss in 2016, when a high-profile and expensive effort to lift the state’s charter school cap, led by DFER’s Massachusetts chapter, failed 62 percent to 38 percent, with cities all over the state, including Boston, voting in opposition. (The now-defunct pro-charter group Families for Excellent Schools, was later finedfor illegally funneling nearly $2.5 million from out of state into the charter expansion effort.)
Then, in 2017, with Trump in office and billionaire Betsy DeVos appointed to lead the Education Department, the Democratic-leaning education reform movement was put further on the defensive, forced to explain why its vision for school choice should not be confused with that of the Trump administration, and why it should shoulder no blame for the escalating attacks on public education. It didn’t help having people like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani proclaiming, “President-elect Trump is going to be the best thing that ever happened for school choice and the charter school movement.”
Later that year, Gallup reported a growing partisan divide on charters, with Democratic support at 48 percent, down from 61 percent in 2012. Republican support remained steady over the five years, at 62 percent.
DFER has at times struggled to find its footing in this changing political landscape. Shavar Jeffries told the education news website Chalkbeat in 2017 that while his group has been fighting DeVos’s policies and for-profit charter schools, they also still spend much of their time fighting Democrats. “When we fight the union and old-guard Democrats, which is honestly what we spend most of our time doing, we don’t fight them because they’re Democrats; we fight them because we think they’re wrong on what’s right for kids.” In addition to charter-friendly policies, their website lists additional advocacy focus areas, including school funding, test-based accountability, and teacher prep programs.
To maintain its credibility within the party, DFER often points to Obama, who remains very popular among liberals. “We’re very clear about the legacy in which we operate,” Shavar Jeffries told Buzzfeed earlier this year. “We operate within the legacy of Barack Obama. His agenda is our agenda, and it’s an agenda that hundreds of Democrats across the country support.”
GETTING HAKEEM JEFFRIES, a pro-charter DFER-affiliated politician, into a top Democratic leadership position is no doubt good news for the organization, which suffered several blows in the 2018 midterm elections. (It spent at least $4 million in the latest cycle.)
Earlier this month, the organization’s endorsed candidate for California state superintendent of public instruction, Marshall Tuck, lost to Tony Thurmond, who was backed by the state Democratic party and teachers unions. DFER had also endorsed Antonio Villaraigosa in an unsuccessful bid to become California’s next governor. The charter movement spent $23 million in support of Villaraigosa, the largest independent expenditure for a gubernatorial primary in California’s history, but his opponent Gavin Newsom won the Democratic primary and general election easily.
In New York, a slew of progressive Democrats won their state Senate races, dramatically upending the composition of the state assembly and unseating the caucus of moderate Democrats who backed charter schools and often voted with Republicans. The new crop of Democrats is expected to fight efforts to lift New York’s charter school cap and to push for more charter school regulations.
In Washington, D.C., DFER’s involvement in the local school board election also raised eyebrows this year. One parent blogger determined that in 2018, DFER DC political action and independent expenditure committees raised over $520,000 -- four times as much in contributions as the rest of the city’s independent expenditure committees combined. One DFER DC-endorsed candidate, Jason Andrean, raised the most moneyout of all individuals vying for a State Board of Education seat, though he ended up losing his race to a candidate who is vocally critical of DFER candidate. In the lead-up to election, DFER itself became a campaign issue, with candidates frequently challenged on their support for or opposition to the organization.
And in Colorado, though the state’s Democratic leadership has been broadly supportive of education reform policies and Gov.-elect Jared Polis has founded charter schools himself, Democratic voters have been voicing growing distrust of DFER. Last spring, delegates at the Colorado Democratic State Assembly voted overwhelmingly for a platform amendment calling DFER to remove the word “Democrats” from its name.
DFER held its 5th annual “Camp Philos” conference, a national gathering for education reform advocates, this week. At the conference, taking place in Boulder, Colorado, leaders grappled with how to chart their political path heading into 2020.
On Wednesday morning, before votes were cast in the caucus chair race, Rep. Juan Vargas, D-Calif., introduced Jeffries, He was, Vargas told the assembled Democrats, “the next Obama.”
While DFER really began to flex its financial muscles in 2008 — when it raised about $2 million to help elect pro-charter candidates — its earlier work focused primarily on New York. There, the group helped elect Hakeem Jeffries to the New York State Assembly in 2006. (He served in the state Legislature from 2007 to 2012.) In 2007, DFER also helped lobby New York legislators to lift the state’s charter school cap, increasing it from 150 schools to 250. In 2010, Jeffries co-sponsored legislation to raise the state’s charter cap even further, to 460 — where it stands today.
Over the years, Jeffries has become one of DFER’s top candidates. In 2012, when Jeffries announced that he would run for Congress, the group rallied behind him, elevating him to its so-called DFER Hot List. No other Democrat received more in direct DFER contributions that cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Though Jeffries has long been close to DFER, he’s rejected money from other school reform advocacy groups. In 2012, he turned down funds from a new group called StudentsFirstNY which offered him a six-figure contribution in the form of an independent expenditure.
“The Jeffries campaign does not believe that independent expenditures have a place in this race,” his campaign spokesperson said at the time. “We did not seek it, do not want it, and will win without it. Those involved with the proposed independent expenditure should refrain from involvement in this race and respect the candidate’s strong belief that unregulated money has no place in the political discourse.”
Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Jeffries did not respond to questions on Jeffries’s relationship with DFER, his plans for education reform advocacy as caucus chair, and his current views on independent expenditures.
Jeffries “embodies the Obama education agenda we support: greater investments in public education; strong standards to ensure our children are ready for the global economy; and diverse, high quality public school options for our parents to choose from,” DFER president Shavar Jeffries told The Intercept. (The two Jeffries are not confirmed blood relatives, but identify as cousins.)
“Alongside the election of reform-supporting governors and state and local officials around the county,” Shavar Jeffries continued, “his ascendancy into greater leadership in the House signals that the Obama reform agenda remains strong.”
While in Congress, Jeffries has stayed close to the charter movement. He’s spoken at fundraisers for Success Academy, the prominent New York City charter network, and in 2016 was the keynote speaker for a large pro-charter rally, organized to pressure Mayor Bill de Blasio to expand charters in New York City.
De Blasio has been critical of the publicly funded, privately managed schools. For a while, there were rumblings that Jeffries could mount a charter school-backed challenge to de Blasio’s 2017 re-election, something he did not immediately rule out at the time. “My inclination remains to remain in Washington. … However all options are on the table and I am going to take a hard look at where I can make a difference in the next few years,” he told Politico in 2016. (Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of Success Academy, also considered a pro-charter challenge to de Blasio for mayor, but decided to remain on her perch to influence education reform politics nationally.)
Jeffries has been called the “Barack Obama of Brooklyn,” in part for his education policy stances, as Obama was also an early DFER-backed candidate. DFER is credited with derailing Linda Darling-Hammond’s bid for education secretary in the Obama administration.
Darling-Hammond is a progressive education policy expert who has positive relationships with teachers unions. As education journalist Dana Goldstein reported in 2009:
In recent months, DFER has had a number of high-profile successes, chief among them a highly coordinated media campaign to call into question the work of Obama education adviser Linda Darling-Hammond, once considered a top contender for the job of education secretary. During the same week in early December, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe published editorials or op-eds based on DFER’s anti-Darling-Hammond talking points, which focused on the Stanford professor’s criticisms of Teach for America and other alternative-certification programs for teachers. Less than two weeks later, Obama appointed DFER’s choice to the Education Department post, Chicago schools CEO [Arne] Duncan.
DFER, and education reform generally, has traditionally been linked to affluent white collar industries like tech and — especially in New York — finance. For example, when Moskowitz, a DFER supporter, published a memoir in 2017, she urged her readers to approach income inequality “delicately in an age when hedge fund managers can work anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.” She scolded de Blasio’s “class-warfare rhetoric” as “imprudent and dangerous.” The financial sector has contributed substantially to Jeffries’s political campaigns.
POLITICS WITHIN BOTH the Democratic Party and the national electorate, however, have changed since 2009, and DFER’s strategies of opposing teachers unions and raising money from the super wealthy have grown more controversial. As progressives have embraced a sharper critique of Wall Street and economic inequality, and as organized labor continues to battle escalating attacks from right-wing interest groups and a hostile judicial system, an anti-union message from Wall Street Democrats has grown considerably less popular.
It was clear, even before Trump won the presidency in 2016, that Democratic elected officials were facing greater pressure to balance their support for charters, a favored cause of many of their donors, with growing public skepticism of the schools. In 2016, candidates like Hillary Clinton and elected officials like Jeffries himself maintained their vocal support for charters but began articulating their opposition to for-profit charter schools, a small but politically powerful segment of the movement. (Kevin Chavous, a co-founder of DFER and a former board chair for the organization, now serves as president of academics, policy and schools for K12 Inc., a national for-profit charter school company.) Democrats also explicitly spelled out opposition to for-profit charters for the first time in their 2016 party platform.
Education reform Democrats suffered a significant loss in 2016, when a high-profile and expensive effort to lift the state’s charter school cap, led by DFER’s Massachusetts chapter, failed 62 percent to 38 percent, with cities all over the state, including Boston, voting in opposition. (The now-defunct pro-charter group Families for Excellent Schools, was later finedfor illegally funneling nearly $2.5 million from out of state into the charter expansion effort.)
Then, in 2017, with Trump in office and billionaire Betsy DeVos appointed to lead the Education Department, the Democratic-leaning education reform movement was put further on the defensive, forced to explain why its vision for school choice should not be confused with that of the Trump administration, and why it should shoulder no blame for the escalating attacks on public education. It didn’t help having people like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani proclaiming, “President-elect Trump is going to be the best thing that ever happened for school choice and the charter school movement.”
Later that year, Gallup reported a growing partisan divide on charters, with Democratic support at 48 percent, down from 61 percent in 2012. Republican support remained steady over the five years, at 62 percent.
DFER has at times struggled to find its footing in this changing political landscape. Shavar Jeffries told the education news website Chalkbeat in 2017 that while his group has been fighting DeVos’s policies and for-profit charter schools, they also still spend much of their time fighting Democrats. “When we fight the union and old-guard Democrats, which is honestly what we spend most of our time doing, we don’t fight them because they’re Democrats; we fight them because we think they’re wrong on what’s right for kids.” In addition to charter-friendly policies, their website lists additional advocacy focus areas, including school funding, test-based accountability, and teacher prep programs.
To maintain its credibility within the party, DFER often points to Obama, who remains very popular among liberals. “We’re very clear about the legacy in which we operate,” Shavar Jeffries told Buzzfeed earlier this year. “We operate within the legacy of Barack Obama. His agenda is our agenda, and it’s an agenda that hundreds of Democrats across the country support.”
GETTING HAKEEM JEFFRIES, a pro-charter DFER-affiliated politician, into a top Democratic leadership position is no doubt good news for the organization, which suffered several blows in the 2018 midterm elections. (It spent at least $4 million in the latest cycle.)
Earlier this month, the organization’s endorsed candidate for California state superintendent of public instruction, Marshall Tuck, lost to Tony Thurmond, who was backed by the state Democratic party and teachers unions. DFER had also endorsed Antonio Villaraigosa in an unsuccessful bid to become California’s next governor. The charter movement spent $23 million in support of Villaraigosa, the largest independent expenditure for a gubernatorial primary in California’s history, but his opponent Gavin Newsom won the Democratic primary and general election easily.
In New York, a slew of progressive Democrats won their state Senate races, dramatically upending the composition of the state assembly and unseating the caucus of moderate Democrats who backed charter schools and often voted with Republicans. The new crop of Democrats is expected to fight efforts to lift New York’s charter school cap and to push for more charter school regulations.
In Washington, D.C., DFER’s involvement in the local school board election also raised eyebrows this year. One parent blogger determined that in 2018, DFER DC political action and independent expenditure committees raised over $520,000 -- four times as much in contributions as the rest of the city’s independent expenditure committees combined. One DFER DC-endorsed candidate, Jason Andrean, raised the most moneyout of all individuals vying for a State Board of Education seat, though he ended up losing his race to a candidate who is vocally critical of DFER candidate. In the lead-up to election, DFER itself became a campaign issue, with candidates frequently challenged on their support for or opposition to the organization.
And in Colorado, though the state’s Democratic leadership has been broadly supportive of education reform policies and Gov.-elect Jared Polis has founded charter schools himself, Democratic voters have been voicing growing distrust of DFER. Last spring, delegates at the Colorado Democratic State Assembly voted overwhelmingly for a platform amendment calling DFER to remove the word “Democrats” from its name.
DFER held its 5th annual “Camp Philos” conference, a national gathering for education reform advocates, this week. At the conference, taking place in Boulder, Colorado, leaders grappled with how to chart their political path heading into 2020.
On Wednesday morning, before votes were cast in the caucus chair race, Rep. Juan Vargas, D-Calif., introduced Jeffries, He was, Vargas told the assembled Democrats, “the next Obama.”
WHO’S THE MYSTERY MAN BEHIND THE LATEST PELOSI PUTSCH? IT’S MARK PENN.
Ryan Grim - the intercept
November 26 2018, 3:42 p.m.
A SMALL GROUP of billionaire-backed Democrats, part of the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus in Congress, has launched a last-ditch effort that threatens to derail Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s election as House speaker.
They’ve framed their challenge to Pelosi, a California Democrat, in terms of good government and high-minded bipartisanship. Yet the force behind their campaign is one of the most toxic and notorious partisan warriors the Democratic Party has produced in the past three decades: political and corporate consultant Mark Penn.
The Problem Solvers Caucus is made up of 12 Democrats and 12 Republicans; nine of the Democrats have publicly committed to opposing Pelosi on the House floor if she doesn’t meet their demands for House rules changes largely aimed at legislatively empowering Republicans. Combined with the holdouts from the last putsch effort, there would be enough votes to thwart Pelosi.
The Democratic chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus is Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, who has been a protege of Penn’s since the 1990s, when he was just out of college. Gottheimer is one of the nine members making demands of Pelosi. She and the caucus will meet Tuesday afternoon to go over the group’s demands.
The caucus was born out of meetings of congresspeople organized by No Labels, which was founded in 2010 as a bipartisan group, backed by wealthy donors, ostensibly dedicated to civility and good government. Nancy Jacobson, Penn’s wife, is the No Labels CEO, and Penn is also closely involved with the group. Gottheimer was elected to Congress in 2016 and co-founded the caucus, with Rep. Tom Reed, R-N.Y., shortly thereafter.
The links between Gottheimer and Penn go back decades. Gottheimer was Penn’s assistant in the Bill Clinton White House in the 1990s. Then in 2006, when Penn was CEO of the consulting firm Burson-Marsteller, he hired Gottheimer as an executive vice president, with Gottheimer reporting directly to him. When Penn became chief strategist of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, he brought on Gottheimer as an adviser. In 2012, Penn set up shop at Microsoft, where he built a guerrilla PR operation to do battle in Washington with rival Google. There, too, he brought on Gottheimer.
Gottheimer had the full-throated support of both Bill and Hillary Clinton when he ran for Congress in 2016, with Hillary Clinton calling him “something of a family member.”
No Labels launched what it called “The Speaker Project” in this past June, proposing a sweeping set of rules changes that lawmakers should demand before agreeing to elect the next speaker, which by then was presumed to be a Democrat. The next month, the Problem Solvers Caucus embraced the plan. In September, Penn went on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News to talk up the project. “There’s a problem-solvers group that is looking to have some influence if the result is close, in terms of changing the rules and naming the speaker,” Penn said.
A lawsuit this summer by former No Labels contractors who alleged that they were bilked by the group claimed that Penn was was “calling the shots” at the organization. Penn, according to the Washington Post, has denied involvement with the operation of No Labels, and the group rejected the assertion that he was in charge. Neither No Labels nor Penn responded to The Intercept’s questions about Penn’s relationship with the group.
But aside from the claims of the contractors, there are also direct links between groups Penn owns and No Labels’s political activity. Penn is a minority owner of the consulting firm Targeted Victory, which the group contracted with for some of its 2018 campaigns. No Labels uses an affiliate, Victory Passport, for its online fundraising. Penn’s firm Harris Interactive does the group’s polling;
SKDKnickerbocker, of which Penn is an owner, produces and places the group’s television ads, as it did in its campaign to support the re-election of Rep. Daniel Lipinski in Illinois, according to the lawsuit. Hilary Rosen, an SKDK partner, said that the firm does not produce ads for No Labels.
The New Center, a think tank launched by No Labels to house its 501c3 nonprofit operation, listed Mark Penn as a contact for inquiries about its invitation-only “ideas summit.” Penn is managing partner and president of the Stagwell Group, the holding company that owns SKDKnickerbocker. Penn regularly talks up the great work of No Labels during his appearances on Fox News.
The network of Super PACs linked to No Labels — which go by a variety of names, according to a Sun-Times investigation, including United for Progress, Citizens for a Strong America, United Together, and Govern or Go Home — spent millions in the 2018 midterms, mostly to help elect members of the Problem Solvers Caucus. Its most high-profile intervention came in defense of Lipinski, a conservative Democrat who faced a well-organized primary challenge from progressive Marie Newman, winning by just 2,000 votes.
Pelosi backed Lipinski in the primary, and now he is part of the effort to block her speakership. The Daily Beast reported Monday that Jacobson considered Pelosi’s support of Lipinski insufficient, and the group considered making her a “bogeyman.” They ultimately settled on attacking Sen. Bernie Sanders instead.
No Labels’s Super PACs also spent heavily to beat incoming Rep. Deb Haaland, who nonetheless prevailed in New Mexico and will soon be one of the first two Native American members of Congress.
Pelosi will meet Tuesday afternoon with members of the Problem Solvers Caucus to hear out their demands. One of the initial planks of the Speaker Project was that the House speaker should be a bipartisan position, with the speaker needing five more votes than the number of their majority party. That demand has been dialed back, but the rules changes being called for are in a similar vein, with the purpose of stripping power from the majority party and requiring Republican support for legislation.
PENN IS NOTORIOUS in Washington as the metaphorical devil on the shoulder, whispering toxic advice into the ears of Democratic candidates. Penn and Jacobson were both early players in the Democratic Leadership Council, a faction that emerged within the party in the 1980s to push it to align with corporate money and to move in a more conservative direction. He’s perhaps most well known for urging his client, Hillary Clinton, to attack Barack Obama as un-American during the 2008 presidential primary.
In a now-famous 2007 memo to Clinton, Penn noted that there had been much coverage in the media of Obama’s “boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii … geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050.”
In other words, Penn argued, an appeal to diversity wouldn’t work politically for another half-century. “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values,” he wrote.
How Penn planned to isolate Obama’s alleged otherness is a window into how he views the kind of glossy, good government rhetoric now deployed by No Labels — its meaning is found less in what it says than in what it doesn’t. He advised Clinton that “we give some life to this contrast without turning negative” by elevating the values she grew up with as uniquely American. “Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century.”
That, Penn argued, would make an implicit contrast with Obama, who allegedly lacked those values — “fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back” — due to his lack of American roots. “Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this the new American Century, the American Strategic Energy fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds,” he advised. “We are never going to say anything about his background — we have to show the value of ours when it comes to making decisions, understanding the needs of most Americans — the invisible Americans.”
Clinton, clumsy in her rhetoric, would occasionally make the subtext into text. In a 2008 speech in West Virginia after she beat Obama in Indiana,she said, “Senator Obama’s support among working — hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.” (Obama went on to win Indiana in the general election.)
A more effective dog-whistler, in the 2016 campaign, would boil the Penn approach down to just four words: “Make America Great Again.” Donald Trump was named by No Labels in 2016 as an official “Problem Solver.”
A Trump surrogate accepted the award, even though two months earlier, Trump had spoken at a No Labels conference and delivered a speech larded with Trumpisms. (Since his 2017 swearing in, Gottheimer, the Problem Solvers Caucus chair, has voted with Trump more than half the time, according to FiveThirtyEight.)
Jon Favreau, a longtime aide to Obama and a co-founder of Crooked Media, said that the No Labels/Problem Solvers Caucus focus on Pelosi makes little sense with Mitch McConnell in the Senate and Trump in the White House, given how little interest those two have shown in civility or bipartisanship. But an incoherent strategy was not terribly surprising coming from Penn. “You mean the guy who Laura Ingraham recently praised for sounding just like her?” Favreau said of Penn. “Sterling track record of success as a consultant. I’d rather light my money on fire than use it to hire him for literally anything.”
They’ve framed their challenge to Pelosi, a California Democrat, in terms of good government and high-minded bipartisanship. Yet the force behind their campaign is one of the most toxic and notorious partisan warriors the Democratic Party has produced in the past three decades: political and corporate consultant Mark Penn.
The Problem Solvers Caucus is made up of 12 Democrats and 12 Republicans; nine of the Democrats have publicly committed to opposing Pelosi on the House floor if she doesn’t meet their demands for House rules changes largely aimed at legislatively empowering Republicans. Combined with the holdouts from the last putsch effort, there would be enough votes to thwart Pelosi.
The Democratic chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus is Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, who has been a protege of Penn’s since the 1990s, when he was just out of college. Gottheimer is one of the nine members making demands of Pelosi. She and the caucus will meet Tuesday afternoon to go over the group’s demands.
The caucus was born out of meetings of congresspeople organized by No Labels, which was founded in 2010 as a bipartisan group, backed by wealthy donors, ostensibly dedicated to civility and good government. Nancy Jacobson, Penn’s wife, is the No Labels CEO, and Penn is also closely involved with the group. Gottheimer was elected to Congress in 2016 and co-founded the caucus, with Rep. Tom Reed, R-N.Y., shortly thereafter.
The links between Gottheimer and Penn go back decades. Gottheimer was Penn’s assistant in the Bill Clinton White House in the 1990s. Then in 2006, when Penn was CEO of the consulting firm Burson-Marsteller, he hired Gottheimer as an executive vice president, with Gottheimer reporting directly to him. When Penn became chief strategist of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, he brought on Gottheimer as an adviser. In 2012, Penn set up shop at Microsoft, where he built a guerrilla PR operation to do battle in Washington with rival Google. There, too, he brought on Gottheimer.
Gottheimer had the full-throated support of both Bill and Hillary Clinton when he ran for Congress in 2016, with Hillary Clinton calling him “something of a family member.”
No Labels launched what it called “The Speaker Project” in this past June, proposing a sweeping set of rules changes that lawmakers should demand before agreeing to elect the next speaker, which by then was presumed to be a Democrat. The next month, the Problem Solvers Caucus embraced the plan. In September, Penn went on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News to talk up the project. “There’s a problem-solvers group that is looking to have some influence if the result is close, in terms of changing the rules and naming the speaker,” Penn said.
A lawsuit this summer by former No Labels contractors who alleged that they were bilked by the group claimed that Penn was was “calling the shots” at the organization. Penn, according to the Washington Post, has denied involvement with the operation of No Labels, and the group rejected the assertion that he was in charge. Neither No Labels nor Penn responded to The Intercept’s questions about Penn’s relationship with the group.
But aside from the claims of the contractors, there are also direct links between groups Penn owns and No Labels’s political activity. Penn is a minority owner of the consulting firm Targeted Victory, which the group contracted with for some of its 2018 campaigns. No Labels uses an affiliate, Victory Passport, for its online fundraising. Penn’s firm Harris Interactive does the group’s polling;
SKDKnickerbocker, of which Penn is an owner, produces and places the group’s television ads, as it did in its campaign to support the re-election of Rep. Daniel Lipinski in Illinois, according to the lawsuit. Hilary Rosen, an SKDK partner, said that the firm does not produce ads for No Labels.
The New Center, a think tank launched by No Labels to house its 501c3 nonprofit operation, listed Mark Penn as a contact for inquiries about its invitation-only “ideas summit.” Penn is managing partner and president of the Stagwell Group, the holding company that owns SKDKnickerbocker. Penn regularly talks up the great work of No Labels during his appearances on Fox News.
The network of Super PACs linked to No Labels — which go by a variety of names, according to a Sun-Times investigation, including United for Progress, Citizens for a Strong America, United Together, and Govern or Go Home — spent millions in the 2018 midterms, mostly to help elect members of the Problem Solvers Caucus. Its most high-profile intervention came in defense of Lipinski, a conservative Democrat who faced a well-organized primary challenge from progressive Marie Newman, winning by just 2,000 votes.
Pelosi backed Lipinski in the primary, and now he is part of the effort to block her speakership. The Daily Beast reported Monday that Jacobson considered Pelosi’s support of Lipinski insufficient, and the group considered making her a “bogeyman.” They ultimately settled on attacking Sen. Bernie Sanders instead.
No Labels’s Super PACs also spent heavily to beat incoming Rep. Deb Haaland, who nonetheless prevailed in New Mexico and will soon be one of the first two Native American members of Congress.
Pelosi will meet Tuesday afternoon with members of the Problem Solvers Caucus to hear out their demands. One of the initial planks of the Speaker Project was that the House speaker should be a bipartisan position, with the speaker needing five more votes than the number of their majority party. That demand has been dialed back, but the rules changes being called for are in a similar vein, with the purpose of stripping power from the majority party and requiring Republican support for legislation.
PENN IS NOTORIOUS in Washington as the metaphorical devil on the shoulder, whispering toxic advice into the ears of Democratic candidates. Penn and Jacobson were both early players in the Democratic Leadership Council, a faction that emerged within the party in the 1980s to push it to align with corporate money and to move in a more conservative direction. He’s perhaps most well known for urging his client, Hillary Clinton, to attack Barack Obama as un-American during the 2008 presidential primary.
In a now-famous 2007 memo to Clinton, Penn noted that there had been much coverage in the media of Obama’s “boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii … geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050.”
In other words, Penn argued, an appeal to diversity wouldn’t work politically for another half-century. “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values,” he wrote.
How Penn planned to isolate Obama’s alleged otherness is a window into how he views the kind of glossy, good government rhetoric now deployed by No Labels — its meaning is found less in what it says than in what it doesn’t. He advised Clinton that “we give some life to this contrast without turning negative” by elevating the values she grew up with as uniquely American. “Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century.”
That, Penn argued, would make an implicit contrast with Obama, who allegedly lacked those values — “fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back” — due to his lack of American roots. “Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this the new American Century, the American Strategic Energy fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds,” he advised. “We are never going to say anything about his background — we have to show the value of ours when it comes to making decisions, understanding the needs of most Americans — the invisible Americans.”
Clinton, clumsy in her rhetoric, would occasionally make the subtext into text. In a 2008 speech in West Virginia after she beat Obama in Indiana,she said, “Senator Obama’s support among working — hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.” (Obama went on to win Indiana in the general election.)
A more effective dog-whistler, in the 2016 campaign, would boil the Penn approach down to just four words: “Make America Great Again.” Donald Trump was named by No Labels in 2016 as an official “Problem Solver.”
A Trump surrogate accepted the award, even though two months earlier, Trump had spoken at a No Labels conference and delivered a speech larded with Trumpisms. (Since his 2017 swearing in, Gottheimer, the Problem Solvers Caucus chair, has voted with Trump more than half the time, according to FiveThirtyEight.)
Jon Favreau, a longtime aide to Obama and a co-founder of Crooked Media, said that the No Labels/Problem Solvers Caucus focus on Pelosi makes little sense with Mitch McConnell in the Senate and Trump in the White House, given how little interest those two have shown in civility or bipartisanship. But an incoherent strategy was not terribly surprising coming from Penn. “You mean the guy who Laura Ingraham recently praised for sounding just like her?” Favreau said of Penn. “Sterling track record of success as a consultant. I’d rather light my money on fire than use it to hire him for literally anything.”
‘No Labels’ spent $2.5 million against House Democratic majority, now wants veto on their leadership
The group is pushing an effort by its "Problem Solvers Caucus" to weaken the new majority's power.
JOSH ISRAEL - thinkprogress
NOV 26, 2018, 12:30 PM
A group of “centrist” donors spent millions to protect some of the most vulnerable House Republicans in the 2018 election, but now is pushing to dictate the terms of who House Democrats pick to lead their new majority.
The No Labels super PAC, an outside group funded heavily by rich Chicago mega-donors, spent more than $2.5 million in the 2018 campaign to buck up vulnerable House Republicans hoping to retain their positions in the face of the blue wave. Several vulnerable GOP incumbents held on, thanks in part to this group’s largess. The biggest beneficiary, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), narrowly won after the group spent nearly $600,000 to help re-elect him, though six-figure “independent expenditures” for Republican Reps. Carlos Curbelo of Florida ($436,965), Leonard Lance of New Jersey ($420,712), and Mike Coffman of Colorado ($369,935) were not enough to save their seats.
The super PAC reported spending only about half as much (just over $1.25 million) in support of centrist House Democrats.
Now, after impeding the new Democratic majority and helping to limit the size of its majority, No Labels wants to condition which Democrat gets lead the House on a series of House rule changes designed to limit the majority’s power. The group is trying to demand that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) or any other candidate for Speaker of the House agree to a “Break the Gridlock” package being offered by its Congressional arm, the Problem Solvers Caucus.
The package includes changes that would make it easier to remove a Speaker of the House mid-term, would put more members of the minority party on House committees, and would give the minority more power to demand votes on amendments to legislation.
Although the Problem Solvers Caucus for the current 115th Congress claimed “48 members — equally divided between Democrats and Republicans — who are committed to forging bipartisan cooperation on key issues,” the 24 Republicans did not hold together to require any moderation or problem solving. Had they insisted on these rules in the current Congress, they had the votes to force Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) to make those changes, but never did. Now, after spending heavily to deny the Democrats the majority, No Labels seeks to hold them to a different standard.
According to the No Labels website, nine Democratic “Problem Solvers” have suggested they will withhold their support for Pelosi unless she agrees to their demands. No Labels is actively pushing for more members of the group to use their clout to force the changes through. Regardless of the merits of their ideas, it seems odd that the people who spent millions to deny the Democrats the majority now feel entitled to a veto over who will lead it.
The No Labels super PAC, an outside group funded heavily by rich Chicago mega-donors, spent more than $2.5 million in the 2018 campaign to buck up vulnerable House Republicans hoping to retain their positions in the face of the blue wave. Several vulnerable GOP incumbents held on, thanks in part to this group’s largess. The biggest beneficiary, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), narrowly won after the group spent nearly $600,000 to help re-elect him, though six-figure “independent expenditures” for Republican Reps. Carlos Curbelo of Florida ($436,965), Leonard Lance of New Jersey ($420,712), and Mike Coffman of Colorado ($369,935) were not enough to save their seats.
The super PAC reported spending only about half as much (just over $1.25 million) in support of centrist House Democrats.
Now, after impeding the new Democratic majority and helping to limit the size of its majority, No Labels wants to condition which Democrat gets lead the House on a series of House rule changes designed to limit the majority’s power. The group is trying to demand that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) or any other candidate for Speaker of the House agree to a “Break the Gridlock” package being offered by its Congressional arm, the Problem Solvers Caucus.
The package includes changes that would make it easier to remove a Speaker of the House mid-term, would put more members of the minority party on House committees, and would give the minority more power to demand votes on amendments to legislation.
Although the Problem Solvers Caucus for the current 115th Congress claimed “48 members — equally divided between Democrats and Republicans — who are committed to forging bipartisan cooperation on key issues,” the 24 Republicans did not hold together to require any moderation or problem solving. Had they insisted on these rules in the current Congress, they had the votes to force Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) to make those changes, but never did. Now, after spending heavily to deny the Democrats the majority, No Labels seeks to hold them to a different standard.
According to the No Labels website, nine Democratic “Problem Solvers” have suggested they will withhold their support for Pelosi unless she agrees to their demands. No Labels is actively pushing for more members of the group to use their clout to force the changes through. Regardless of the merits of their ideas, it seems odd that the people who spent millions to deny the Democrats the majority now feel entitled to a veto over who will lead it.
These Democrats are working with Republicans to possibly block Pelosi’s House Speaker bid
Blue Dog Democrats and the House Problem Solvers Caucus make up the newest opposition from Pelosi's right.
FRANK DALE - thinkprogress
NOV 25, 2018, 6:58 AM
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has even more moderate Democrats to worry about in her bid to become Speaker of the House for the second time.
16 Democratic colleagues, later reduced to 15 when Rep. Brian Higgins (NY) changed course, signed a letter opposing the California congresswoman earlier this week.
Now another group of moderate Democrats is threatening to upend Pelosi’s House Speaker bid. And they’re working with Republicans to do it.
The House Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan collection of lawmakers that reportedly has solved very few problems since its creation, is refusing to back Pelosi unless she adopts their proposed rule changes.
The Problem Solvers have billed the proposals as “breaking the gridlock” of Congress, but CNN notes the rules changes would “empower rank-and-file members to push bills in the House, a power now reserved for the leadership.”
Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) ripped the Problem Solvers’ proposed “GOP-friendly rules that will hamstring healthcare efforts from the get-go.”
As The Intercept’s Ryan Grim pointed out, the House Problem Solvers Caucus is backed by No Labels, an “aggressively centrist” political action group that has been called “the most useless force in American politics.”
Nine Democrats are reportedly part of the Problem Solvers’ effort.
All nine of these Democrats have supported President Donald Trump’s agenda more frequently than Pelosi, per FiveThirtyEight’s congressional Trump tracker.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (NJ): 54.8 percent
New Jersey’s congressional delegation will only have one Republican come January, but Gottehimer, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, has voted with Trump nearly 55 percent of the time. His 5th congressional district in the suburbs of New York City is rated as Republicans +3 by the Cook Partisan Voting Index, which “measures how each district performs at the presidential level compared to the nation as a whole.”
The two-term congressman, who is part of the Blue Dog Coalition of moderate Democrats, voted for rolling back Dodd-Frank financial regulations put in place after the Great Recession, the GOP’s omnibus spending bill, “Kate’s Law” to increase penalties for undocumented immigrants who re-enter the U.S., a resolution that supported Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and denounced calls for its abolishment, and a failed push to add a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
Rep. Tom O’Halleran (AZ): 53.8 percent
O’Halleran has supported Trump’s agenda almost 54 percent of the time in the 1st congressional district, which contains most of the rural eastern part of the state, and is rated R+2 by Cook.
The two-term congressman, who quit the Republican Party in 2014 and became a Democrat in 2016, backed the pro-ICE resolution, the repeal of Dodd-Frank regulations, “Kate’s Law”, and the Republicans’ omnibus spending bill.
The Blue Dog Democrat also voted against a carbon tax.
Rep. Stephanie Murphy (FL): 50 percent
Murphy, who represents the evenly-rated 7th congressional district near Orlando, has voted with Trump half of the time.
The two-term congresswoman backed the undoing of Dodd-Frank regulations, the GOP’s omnibus spending bill, “Kate’s Law,” and the pro-ICE resolution.
The Blue Dog Democrat also voted against a carbon tax.
Rep. Jim Costa (CA): 47.1 percent
Costa has backed Trump’s agenda almost half of the time despite representing the D+9 16th congressional district near Fresno.
The eight-term congressman supported the pro-ICE resolution, a roll back of Dodd-Frank regulations, GOP omnibus spending bill, and a failed push to add a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
The Blue Dogs Democrat chairman also voted to delay the implementation of ozone regulations.
Rep. Dan Lipinski (IL): 40 percent
Lipinski has voted with Trump 40 percent of the time despite representing a reliably Democratic D+6 district near Chicago.
The eight-term congressman supported banning all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, “Kate’s Law”, and Republicans’ omnibus spending bill.
The Blue Dog Democrat chairman also voted present, a legislative tactic to avoid making a decision, on the pro-ICE resolution.
Rep. Vicente González (TX): 33.7 percent
González represents the heavily-Hispanic, D+7 15th congressional district that stretches nearly from San Antonio to McAllen.
Despite this, the two-term congressman has voted with Trump over a third of the time, including on rolling back Dodd-Frank regulations, making conceal-carry gun permits legal across state lines, and opposing a carbon tax.
The Blue Dog Democrat also voted present on the pro-ICE bill.
Rep. Tom Suozzi (NY): 33.3 percent
Suozzi, who represents the D+1 3rd congressional district on Long Island, has supported Trump’s agenda a third of the time.
The two-term congressman backed the pro-ICE bill and the rollback of Dodd-Frank financial regulations.
Rep. Kurt Schrader (OR): 31.5 percent
Schrader is the only Democrat on this list who also signed the anti-Pelosi letter earlier this week.
The six-term congressman and Blue Dog Democrat has voted with Trump almost a third of the time, including on bills to repeal Dodd-Frank regulations and make conceal-carry gun permits legal across state lines.
Rep. Darren Soto (FL): 21.5 percent
Soto has supported Trump’s agenda almost a quarter of the time despite representing a heavily-Democratic D+6 district near Orlando.
Pelosi needs the support of the majority of the House’s 435 members to be elected Speaker.
The new Democratic majority has continued to grow since Election Day thanks to a handful of close House races that required additional time to count votes.
The gap between Rep. David Valadao (R) and businessman TJ Cox (D) continues to close in California’s 21st congressional district. The incumbent Republican’s lead is now under 500 votes and he’s seen as an underdog, which would give Democrats a total of 40 House flips in the midterms.
Forty seat flips from red to blue would put the Democratic majority at 235, meaning Pelosi could only afford to lose the support of 17 colleagues.
But to make the math even more complicated, Republican support could put Pelosi over the top. Trump has also endorsed the California congresswoman and hinted at GOP votes in multiple tweets.
The main hurdle for anti-Pelosi Democrats is the lack of a serious challenger for the former Speaker, who has led House Democrats since 2003. Rep. Marcia Fudge (R-OH), who was considered the presumed alternative to Pelosi, announced she would be backing the longtime Democratic leader last week.
16 Democratic colleagues, later reduced to 15 when Rep. Brian Higgins (NY) changed course, signed a letter opposing the California congresswoman earlier this week.
Now another group of moderate Democrats is threatening to upend Pelosi’s House Speaker bid. And they’re working with Republicans to do it.
The House Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan collection of lawmakers that reportedly has solved very few problems since its creation, is refusing to back Pelosi unless she adopts their proposed rule changes.
The Problem Solvers have billed the proposals as “breaking the gridlock” of Congress, but CNN notes the rules changes would “empower rank-and-file members to push bills in the House, a power now reserved for the leadership.”
Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) ripped the Problem Solvers’ proposed “GOP-friendly rules that will hamstring healthcare efforts from the get-go.”
As The Intercept’s Ryan Grim pointed out, the House Problem Solvers Caucus is backed by No Labels, an “aggressively centrist” political action group that has been called “the most useless force in American politics.”
Nine Democrats are reportedly part of the Problem Solvers’ effort.
All nine of these Democrats have supported President Donald Trump’s agenda more frequently than Pelosi, per FiveThirtyEight’s congressional Trump tracker.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (NJ): 54.8 percent
New Jersey’s congressional delegation will only have one Republican come January, but Gottehimer, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, has voted with Trump nearly 55 percent of the time. His 5th congressional district in the suburbs of New York City is rated as Republicans +3 by the Cook Partisan Voting Index, which “measures how each district performs at the presidential level compared to the nation as a whole.”
The two-term congressman, who is part of the Blue Dog Coalition of moderate Democrats, voted for rolling back Dodd-Frank financial regulations put in place after the Great Recession, the GOP’s omnibus spending bill, “Kate’s Law” to increase penalties for undocumented immigrants who re-enter the U.S., a resolution that supported Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and denounced calls for its abolishment, and a failed push to add a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
Rep. Tom O’Halleran (AZ): 53.8 percent
O’Halleran has supported Trump’s agenda almost 54 percent of the time in the 1st congressional district, which contains most of the rural eastern part of the state, and is rated R+2 by Cook.
The two-term congressman, who quit the Republican Party in 2014 and became a Democrat in 2016, backed the pro-ICE resolution, the repeal of Dodd-Frank regulations, “Kate’s Law”, and the Republicans’ omnibus spending bill.
The Blue Dog Democrat also voted against a carbon tax.
Rep. Stephanie Murphy (FL): 50 percent
Murphy, who represents the evenly-rated 7th congressional district near Orlando, has voted with Trump half of the time.
The two-term congresswoman backed the undoing of Dodd-Frank regulations, the GOP’s omnibus spending bill, “Kate’s Law,” and the pro-ICE resolution.
The Blue Dog Democrat also voted against a carbon tax.
Rep. Jim Costa (CA): 47.1 percent
Costa has backed Trump’s agenda almost half of the time despite representing the D+9 16th congressional district near Fresno.
The eight-term congressman supported the pro-ICE resolution, a roll back of Dodd-Frank regulations, GOP omnibus spending bill, and a failed push to add a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
The Blue Dogs Democrat chairman also voted to delay the implementation of ozone regulations.
Rep. Dan Lipinski (IL): 40 percent
Lipinski has voted with Trump 40 percent of the time despite representing a reliably Democratic D+6 district near Chicago.
The eight-term congressman supported banning all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, “Kate’s Law”, and Republicans’ omnibus spending bill.
The Blue Dog Democrat chairman also voted present, a legislative tactic to avoid making a decision, on the pro-ICE resolution.
Rep. Vicente González (TX): 33.7 percent
González represents the heavily-Hispanic, D+7 15th congressional district that stretches nearly from San Antonio to McAllen.
Despite this, the two-term congressman has voted with Trump over a third of the time, including on rolling back Dodd-Frank regulations, making conceal-carry gun permits legal across state lines, and opposing a carbon tax.
The Blue Dog Democrat also voted present on the pro-ICE bill.
Rep. Tom Suozzi (NY): 33.3 percent
Suozzi, who represents the D+1 3rd congressional district on Long Island, has supported Trump’s agenda a third of the time.
The two-term congressman backed the pro-ICE bill and the rollback of Dodd-Frank financial regulations.
Rep. Kurt Schrader (OR): 31.5 percent
Schrader is the only Democrat on this list who also signed the anti-Pelosi letter earlier this week.
The six-term congressman and Blue Dog Democrat has voted with Trump almost a third of the time, including on bills to repeal Dodd-Frank regulations and make conceal-carry gun permits legal across state lines.
Rep. Darren Soto (FL): 21.5 percent
Soto has supported Trump’s agenda almost a quarter of the time despite representing a heavily-Democratic D+6 district near Orlando.
Pelosi needs the support of the majority of the House’s 435 members to be elected Speaker.
The new Democratic majority has continued to grow since Election Day thanks to a handful of close House races that required additional time to count votes.
The gap between Rep. David Valadao (R) and businessman TJ Cox (D) continues to close in California’s 21st congressional district. The incumbent Republican’s lead is now under 500 votes and he’s seen as an underdog, which would give Democrats a total of 40 House flips in the midterms.
Forty seat flips from red to blue would put the Democratic majority at 235, meaning Pelosi could only afford to lose the support of 17 colleagues.
But to make the math even more complicated, Republican support could put Pelosi over the top. Trump has also endorsed the California congresswoman and hinted at GOP votes in multiple tweets.
The main hurdle for anti-Pelosi Democrats is the lack of a serious challenger for the former Speaker, who has led House Democrats since 2003. Rep. Marcia Fudge (R-OH), who was considered the presumed alternative to Pelosi, announced she would be backing the longtime Democratic leader last week.
sounds like trump, simplistic and racist!!!
Hillary Clinton: Europe must curb immigration to stop rightwing populists
Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor
the guardian
Thu 22 Nov 2018 09.00 EST
Europe must get a handle on immigration to combat a growing threat from rightwing populists, Hillary Clinton has said, calling on the continent’s leaders to send out a stronger signal showing they are “not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support”.
In an interview with the Guardian, the former Democratic presidential candidate praised the generosity shown by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, but suggested immigration was inflaming voters and contributed to the election of Donald Trump and Britain’s vote to leave the EU.
“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said, speaking as part of a series of interviews with senior centrist political figures about the rise of populists, particularly on the right, in Europe and the Americas.
“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message – ‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ – because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”
Clinton’s remarks are likely to prove controversial across Europe, which has struggled to form a unified position ever since more than 1 million migrants and refugees arrived in the EU in 2015.
While some countries who have borne the brunt, such as Germany, Italy and Greece, have argued for the burden to be shared more evenly, some, particularly in central and eastern Europe, have rejected demands to take in refugees.
Migration numbers have fallen sharply since 2015, while a series of initiatives have been tabled, from a 10,000-member European border and coastguard agency to an overhaul of EU asylum procedures.
Clinton was one of three heavyweights of the centre-left interviewed by the Guardian to better understand why their brand of politics appears to be failing. All three have seen their countries upended by political events that to some degree can be explained by the success of rightwing populism.
The other two interviewees, Tony Blair and Matteo Renzi, agreed that the migration issue had posed significant problems for centrist politics.
“You’ve got to deal with the legitimate grievances and answer them, which is why today in Europe you cannot possibly stand for election unless you’ve got a strong position on immigration because people are worried about it,” Blair said. “You’ve got to answer those problems. If you don’t answer them then … you leave a large space into which the populists can march.”
Clinton urged forces opposed to rightwing populism in Europe and the US not to neglect the concerns about race and identity issues that she says were behind her losing key votes in 2016. She accused Trump of exploiting the issue in the election contest – and in office.
“The use of immigrants as a political device and as a symbol of government gone wrong, of attacks on one’s heritage, one’s identity, one’s national unity has been very much exploited by the current administration here,” she said.
Advertisement“There are solutions to migration that do not require clamping down on the press, on your political opponents and trying to suborn the judiciary, or seeking financial and political help from Russia to support your political parties and movements.”
Brexit, described by Clinton as the biggest act of national economic self-harm in modern history, “was largely about immigration”, she said....
RELATED: Hillary Clinton’s chilling pragmatism gives populism a free pass
Calling on Europe’s leaders to ‘get a handle on migration’ is no counter to populists – it’s more like an endorsement (CLICK)
In an interview with the Guardian, the former Democratic presidential candidate praised the generosity shown by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, but suggested immigration was inflaming voters and contributed to the election of Donald Trump and Britain’s vote to leave the EU.
“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said, speaking as part of a series of interviews with senior centrist political figures about the rise of populists, particularly on the right, in Europe and the Americas.
“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message – ‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ – because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”
Clinton’s remarks are likely to prove controversial across Europe, which has struggled to form a unified position ever since more than 1 million migrants and refugees arrived in the EU in 2015.
While some countries who have borne the brunt, such as Germany, Italy and Greece, have argued for the burden to be shared more evenly, some, particularly in central and eastern Europe, have rejected demands to take in refugees.
Migration numbers have fallen sharply since 2015, while a series of initiatives have been tabled, from a 10,000-member European border and coastguard agency to an overhaul of EU asylum procedures.
Clinton was one of three heavyweights of the centre-left interviewed by the Guardian to better understand why their brand of politics appears to be failing. All three have seen their countries upended by political events that to some degree can be explained by the success of rightwing populism.
The other two interviewees, Tony Blair and Matteo Renzi, agreed that the migration issue had posed significant problems for centrist politics.
“You’ve got to deal with the legitimate grievances and answer them, which is why today in Europe you cannot possibly stand for election unless you’ve got a strong position on immigration because people are worried about it,” Blair said. “You’ve got to answer those problems. If you don’t answer them then … you leave a large space into which the populists can march.”
Clinton urged forces opposed to rightwing populism in Europe and the US not to neglect the concerns about race and identity issues that she says were behind her losing key votes in 2016. She accused Trump of exploiting the issue in the election contest – and in office.
“The use of immigrants as a political device and as a symbol of government gone wrong, of attacks on one’s heritage, one’s identity, one’s national unity has been very much exploited by the current administration here,” she said.
Advertisement“There are solutions to migration that do not require clamping down on the press, on your political opponents and trying to suborn the judiciary, or seeking financial and political help from Russia to support your political parties and movements.”
Brexit, described by Clinton as the biggest act of national economic self-harm in modern history, “was largely about immigration”, she said....
RELATED: Hillary Clinton’s chilling pragmatism gives populism a free pass
Calling on Europe’s leaders to ‘get a handle on migration’ is no counter to populists – it’s more like an endorsement (CLICK)
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).
Who's Really Leading the Democratic Rebellion Against Pelosi?
Richard J. Eskow / Independent Media Institute
11/19/18
It’s impossible to understand the Democratic rebellion against Nancy Pelosi without understanding the way power works in the House of Representatives. To understand the self-serving men behind this rebellion, heed the words of the late screenwriter William Goldman: Follow the money.
There is discontent with Pelosi’s ideology on the left, and that’s understandable. But ideology is not driving this campaign, and this is no populist rebellion. In fact, its leaders have no discernible ideology at all.
That’s how corporate money rolls in the Democratic Party. It lays low, hides its true colors, and pretends it only wants to “get things done.”
The anti-Pelosi insurgency is not a movement. It’s a cabal, orchestrated by the appropriately hashtagged #FiveWhiteGuys, a group of self-self-interested players with big money behind them. These white males resemble nothing so much as the next-generation terminator played by Robert Patrick in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” They’re cunning, aggressive, shape-shifting, and so reflective that anyone who looks at them sees only a distorted image of themselves.
If you’re looking to change politics, they don’t reflect you.
Rebel Without a Cause
This ersatz rebellion’s most visible leader is Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, a custom-crafted biography in a suit who appears to hold no core beliefs. That’s undoubtedly a plus for the political operatives who recruited and promoted him. An early profile has Moulton variously calling himself “a progressive Democrat,” a “pragmatic Democrat,” and a “frustrated Democrat”—and that was just during his first primary.
Moulton was reportedly recruited to run for Congress by “New Politics,” a group that seeks to elect both Democratic and Republican veterans. It describes itself as “bipartisan,” a word will come up again in the story of the anti-Pelosi rebellion. New Politics’ other success story is Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who notably blamed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, rather than the ill-advised Iraq war, for the rise of ISIS.
Moulton, who reportedly backed that tragic misadventure, enjoyed the early support of two generals who helped lead it, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal. (Unfortunately, both are now disgraced: McChrystal for disrespecting the civilian chain of command, and Petraeus for revealing secrets to an extramarital lover as he cheated on his wife, a crime that would have likely led to criminal indictment for a less well-connected official.)
As the Washington Post reports, Moulton “has aligned with Republicans on some policy bills, ranging from a ban on the gun accessories used in last year’s mass shooting in Las Vegas to a recent legislation allowing veterans to use medical marijuana.”
Moulton had praise for Pelosi when he was asked about her last year, saying she had achieved an “awful lot.” He told Politico’s Michael Kruse that he thought much of the Republican criticism of her was “unfair,” but added, “the reality is that we’re losing.”
Well, Pelosi’s winning now. What’s his rationale for opposing Pelosi today? “If that many seats change hands,” Moulton said after the election, “that’s just all the more reason the American people are calling out for change.”
Heads, he wins. Tails, Pelosi loses.
The FIRE Brigade
Moulton’s given to making hazy statements like: “Congress needs a new leader. Period.”
The only concrete thing about him appears to be the money he’s raised for like-minded candidates. “Thanks to a network of donors rooted in the financial centers of Boston and New York,” reports the Post, “Moulton’s Serve America PAC and related political committees raised a combined $8 million for the election cycle.”
Moulton has been well-rewarded for his ideological plasticity. During his short political career, Moulton has received a total of $1,723,870 from the investor class that comprises the so-called “FIRE” sector—financial, insurance, and real estate. He has also received more than $160,000 from Pharma. (These figures come from Open Secrets.)
Moulton isn’t the only member of the five-man anti-Pelosi band, of course. The rhythm section is composed of Colorado’s Ed Perlmutter, Oregon’s Kurt Schrader, and Bill Foster of Illinois. The three men have received $4,082,803, $987,050, and $2,747,969 respectively from the FIRE sector. Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, who mounted a longshot challenge to Pelosi in 2016, is the band’s other leader—the Keith Richards, if you will, to Moulton’s would-be Jagger.
Ryan isn’t running this time around. Instead, Ryan recently insisted that there are “plenty of really competent females that we can replace her with.”
For sheer tone-deafness in gender relations, that phrase belongs with Mitt Romney’s 2012 comment about the “binders full of women” he hoped to appoint as president. It may be worse, in fact, since it suggests females can’t be assumed to be competent. The remark will have an added sting for Democratic women who remember Ryan’s past positions on reproductive rights.
Why does Ryan say Pelosi has to go? “We need a brand change,” Ryan told Rolling Stone. For content-free criticism, that’s about as empty—and as cringeworthy—as it gets.
No Labels, No Point
The rhetorical style of these Democratic “rebels”—vague on the issues, big on cliches and platitudes, the rhetorical equivalent of cotton candy—comes with a pedigree. It is the hallmark of “centrism,” the billionaire-funded political faction that serves its financial backers by selling themselves as “non-ideological,” “technocratic” architects of “bipartisan” consensus who can “break the gridlock” and “solve problems.”
For this crowd, “solving problems” always winds up meaning the same thing: cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and an unwarranted obsession with the federal deficit that always—just accidentally, mind you!—winds up helping corporations and the billionaire class.
The “centrist” political style claims to be “above parties and partisanship”—which, in the end, is another way of saying it’s free of any principles except the interests of its paymasters. It often comes in the guise of patriotism, as when Seth Moulton says he places “country over party”—a comment that, implicitly, is a deep insult to those who believe one party’s proposals would serve the country better than the other’s.
The anti-Pelosi campaign is being supported by one of the mainstays of the corporate centrist world—the cynical political ploy known as “No Labels,” which I wrote about in 2012, and its creation, the “Problem Solvers Caucus.” If you called “No Labels” a guaranteed-employment plan for Republican and Democratic political hacks, you would not be wrong.
Besides, the Problem Solvers Caucus—which, predictably, promised to “break the gridlock” and get things done--hasn’t solved any problems. Given their agenda, that’s a good thing—but it’s hardly a mandate to lead.
It’s Not About the Speakership—It’s About Blocking Progressive Change
The No Labels crowd is throwing its public influence (negligible) and its ability to muster campaign cash (considerable) behind the anti-Pelosi effort for a reason: they see this as an opportunity to weaken the Democrats’ newfound power in the House. That’s especially urgent for the big-money crowd at a time when nearly half of successful new candidates ran on Medicare for All and more than 100 House Democrats have joined the Expand Social Security Caucus.
The “centrist” campaign may help explain why Pelosi plans to impose a new rule making it harder to raise middle-class taxes. This rule would make it harder to achieve either Medicare for All or expanded Social Security, even though any new taxes would leave the working class much better off financially than it is today.
Rep. Tom Reed, a Republican member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, has already indicated he could back Pelosi if more such changes were put in place. The caucus’ additional proposed changes, roughly outlined here, would effectively give Republicans veto power over progressive legislation.
It is noteworthy that there was no serious attempt to implement these rules when Republicans ran the House.
Even more than the speakership, this procedural power grab motivates the anti-Pelosi crowd and its backers. They might even withdraw their opposition to her if they could seize this power for themselves and their “centrist” allies in both parties.
No wonder these “rebels” are vague about their goals. Given the massive support for Medicare for All (more than 70 percent of the public, 85 percent of Democrats) and expanding Social Security, they know their agenda is extremely unpopular. If they truly believed in “country over party,” they would support programs that most of the country wants and needs.
How Power Works
Here’s how power really works in the House of Representatives. The Speaker holds enormous power, but only serves at the pleasure of her caucus. The representatives in that caucus are not her employees; they are her constituents. Anyone who wants to become Speaker has to win their support.
One very effective way to do that is by raising money, as Pelosi has prodigiously done. Another is by managing the House, and the caucus, effectively enough to rack up a list of accomplishments that will help those representatives win reelection.
Here’s something else worth knowing about Democratic power in the House: Its party organizations are still deeply hierarchical, and are built on deeply embedded relationships. If the Moulton/Ryan gang succeeds in unseating Pelosi, the speakership will not go to someone the left supports. Sure, it would be great to see Barbara Lee become Speaker, but that simply isn’t going to happen. Besides, she’s not even running. (Lee is running for the House’s number five position.)
The Five Guys (not to be confused with the burger chain of the same name) and their backers are almost certainly looking for one of two outcomes: either Pelosi accedes to their demands, which will paralyze the Democratic agenda, or Pelosi is replaced with someone who will. But if Pelosi goes down, that replacement will probably not be Rep. Marcia Fudge, despite her public expressions of interest (as of this writing) and Moulton’s professed support for her.
The Five Guys may block Pelosi, but they will not choose her successor. Instead, in the chaos that would follow a Pelosi defeat, the speakership will probably go to the second-highest member of the Democratic hierarchy: Steny Hoyer.
End Game
The left is distressed with Pelosi, and that’s understandable. Pelosi’s commitment to “pay as you go” funding is a political and procedural mistake of the first order. The new tax rule is, as MoveOn.org and others have said, “a staggeringly bad idea”—although that may have been forced on her by the Five Guys crowd. (Progressives should note, however, that this rule could be waived at any time to pass progressive programs.)
A Hoyer speakership would be a catastrophe for the left, for reasons Politico’s Bill Scher lays out here. Hoyer represents the worst of the corporate-backed, “centrist,” economically neoliberal party elite. His faction’s disastrous policies and muddled messaging led it into the political wilderness. With this election, the party has only begun to make up some of the ground lost under its rule.
Progressives should mobilize to defeat Hoyer and replace him, preferably someone who can serve as an heir apparent. And if the left wants a more progressive House Speaker, it needs to run candidates in more primaries. When House Democrats are more progressive, Pelosi or her successor will either change accordingly or be replaced.
Yes, Pelosi’s a big fundraiser. She reportedly raised $135.6 million for this election cycle. A cynic might say that this figure, when compared to Moulton’s $8 million, makes her about 17 times more likely to win this speakership fight.
Pelosi raises that money, from a variety of sources, because she plays to win in the current system. Nancy Pelosi can’t, and won’t, lead the fight to get money out of politics. But then, the Democratic left needs to stop waiting for politicians to fight their battles. That’s what movements are for.
This country needs a mass movement that will demand fundamental political change. But nobody needs the Five Guys’ corporate-backed chaos, or the reactionary regime it seeks to impose on the House of Representatives.
If some leftists don’t want Pelosi to win, that’s understandable. But they should hope with all their hearts that her opponents lose.
There is discontent with Pelosi’s ideology on the left, and that’s understandable. But ideology is not driving this campaign, and this is no populist rebellion. In fact, its leaders have no discernible ideology at all.
That’s how corporate money rolls in the Democratic Party. It lays low, hides its true colors, and pretends it only wants to “get things done.”
The anti-Pelosi insurgency is not a movement. It’s a cabal, orchestrated by the appropriately hashtagged #FiveWhiteGuys, a group of self-self-interested players with big money behind them. These white males resemble nothing so much as the next-generation terminator played by Robert Patrick in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” They’re cunning, aggressive, shape-shifting, and so reflective that anyone who looks at them sees only a distorted image of themselves.
If you’re looking to change politics, they don’t reflect you.
Rebel Without a Cause
This ersatz rebellion’s most visible leader is Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, a custom-crafted biography in a suit who appears to hold no core beliefs. That’s undoubtedly a plus for the political operatives who recruited and promoted him. An early profile has Moulton variously calling himself “a progressive Democrat,” a “pragmatic Democrat,” and a “frustrated Democrat”—and that was just during his first primary.
Moulton was reportedly recruited to run for Congress by “New Politics,” a group that seeks to elect both Democratic and Republican veterans. It describes itself as “bipartisan,” a word will come up again in the story of the anti-Pelosi rebellion. New Politics’ other success story is Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, who notably blamed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, rather than the ill-advised Iraq war, for the rise of ISIS.
Moulton, who reportedly backed that tragic misadventure, enjoyed the early support of two generals who helped lead it, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal. (Unfortunately, both are now disgraced: McChrystal for disrespecting the civilian chain of command, and Petraeus for revealing secrets to an extramarital lover as he cheated on his wife, a crime that would have likely led to criminal indictment for a less well-connected official.)
As the Washington Post reports, Moulton “has aligned with Republicans on some policy bills, ranging from a ban on the gun accessories used in last year’s mass shooting in Las Vegas to a recent legislation allowing veterans to use medical marijuana.”
Moulton had praise for Pelosi when he was asked about her last year, saying she had achieved an “awful lot.” He told Politico’s Michael Kruse that he thought much of the Republican criticism of her was “unfair,” but added, “the reality is that we’re losing.”
Well, Pelosi’s winning now. What’s his rationale for opposing Pelosi today? “If that many seats change hands,” Moulton said after the election, “that’s just all the more reason the American people are calling out for change.”
Heads, he wins. Tails, Pelosi loses.
The FIRE Brigade
Moulton’s given to making hazy statements like: “Congress needs a new leader. Period.”
The only concrete thing about him appears to be the money he’s raised for like-minded candidates. “Thanks to a network of donors rooted in the financial centers of Boston and New York,” reports the Post, “Moulton’s Serve America PAC and related political committees raised a combined $8 million for the election cycle.”
Moulton has been well-rewarded for his ideological plasticity. During his short political career, Moulton has received a total of $1,723,870 from the investor class that comprises the so-called “FIRE” sector—financial, insurance, and real estate. He has also received more than $160,000 from Pharma. (These figures come from Open Secrets.)
Moulton isn’t the only member of the five-man anti-Pelosi band, of course. The rhythm section is composed of Colorado’s Ed Perlmutter, Oregon’s Kurt Schrader, and Bill Foster of Illinois. The three men have received $4,082,803, $987,050, and $2,747,969 respectively from the FIRE sector. Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, who mounted a longshot challenge to Pelosi in 2016, is the band’s other leader—the Keith Richards, if you will, to Moulton’s would-be Jagger.
Ryan isn’t running this time around. Instead, Ryan recently insisted that there are “plenty of really competent females that we can replace her with.”
For sheer tone-deafness in gender relations, that phrase belongs with Mitt Romney’s 2012 comment about the “binders full of women” he hoped to appoint as president. It may be worse, in fact, since it suggests females can’t be assumed to be competent. The remark will have an added sting for Democratic women who remember Ryan’s past positions on reproductive rights.
Why does Ryan say Pelosi has to go? “We need a brand change,” Ryan told Rolling Stone. For content-free criticism, that’s about as empty—and as cringeworthy—as it gets.
No Labels, No Point
The rhetorical style of these Democratic “rebels”—vague on the issues, big on cliches and platitudes, the rhetorical equivalent of cotton candy—comes with a pedigree. It is the hallmark of “centrism,” the billionaire-funded political faction that serves its financial backers by selling themselves as “non-ideological,” “technocratic” architects of “bipartisan” consensus who can “break the gridlock” and “solve problems.”
For this crowd, “solving problems” always winds up meaning the same thing: cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and an unwarranted obsession with the federal deficit that always—just accidentally, mind you!—winds up helping corporations and the billionaire class.
The “centrist” political style claims to be “above parties and partisanship”—which, in the end, is another way of saying it’s free of any principles except the interests of its paymasters. It often comes in the guise of patriotism, as when Seth Moulton says he places “country over party”—a comment that, implicitly, is a deep insult to those who believe one party’s proposals would serve the country better than the other’s.
The anti-Pelosi campaign is being supported by one of the mainstays of the corporate centrist world—the cynical political ploy known as “No Labels,” which I wrote about in 2012, and its creation, the “Problem Solvers Caucus.” If you called “No Labels” a guaranteed-employment plan for Republican and Democratic political hacks, you would not be wrong.
Besides, the Problem Solvers Caucus—which, predictably, promised to “break the gridlock” and get things done--hasn’t solved any problems. Given their agenda, that’s a good thing—but it’s hardly a mandate to lead.
It’s Not About the Speakership—It’s About Blocking Progressive Change
The No Labels crowd is throwing its public influence (negligible) and its ability to muster campaign cash (considerable) behind the anti-Pelosi effort for a reason: they see this as an opportunity to weaken the Democrats’ newfound power in the House. That’s especially urgent for the big-money crowd at a time when nearly half of successful new candidates ran on Medicare for All and more than 100 House Democrats have joined the Expand Social Security Caucus.
The “centrist” campaign may help explain why Pelosi plans to impose a new rule making it harder to raise middle-class taxes. This rule would make it harder to achieve either Medicare for All or expanded Social Security, even though any new taxes would leave the working class much better off financially than it is today.
Rep. Tom Reed, a Republican member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, has already indicated he could back Pelosi if more such changes were put in place. The caucus’ additional proposed changes, roughly outlined here, would effectively give Republicans veto power over progressive legislation.
It is noteworthy that there was no serious attempt to implement these rules when Republicans ran the House.
Even more than the speakership, this procedural power grab motivates the anti-Pelosi crowd and its backers. They might even withdraw their opposition to her if they could seize this power for themselves and their “centrist” allies in both parties.
No wonder these “rebels” are vague about their goals. Given the massive support for Medicare for All (more than 70 percent of the public, 85 percent of Democrats) and expanding Social Security, they know their agenda is extremely unpopular. If they truly believed in “country over party,” they would support programs that most of the country wants and needs.
How Power Works
Here’s how power really works in the House of Representatives. The Speaker holds enormous power, but only serves at the pleasure of her caucus. The representatives in that caucus are not her employees; they are her constituents. Anyone who wants to become Speaker has to win their support.
One very effective way to do that is by raising money, as Pelosi has prodigiously done. Another is by managing the House, and the caucus, effectively enough to rack up a list of accomplishments that will help those representatives win reelection.
Here’s something else worth knowing about Democratic power in the House: Its party organizations are still deeply hierarchical, and are built on deeply embedded relationships. If the Moulton/Ryan gang succeeds in unseating Pelosi, the speakership will not go to someone the left supports. Sure, it would be great to see Barbara Lee become Speaker, but that simply isn’t going to happen. Besides, she’s not even running. (Lee is running for the House’s number five position.)
The Five Guys (not to be confused with the burger chain of the same name) and their backers are almost certainly looking for one of two outcomes: either Pelosi accedes to their demands, which will paralyze the Democratic agenda, or Pelosi is replaced with someone who will. But if Pelosi goes down, that replacement will probably not be Rep. Marcia Fudge, despite her public expressions of interest (as of this writing) and Moulton’s professed support for her.
The Five Guys may block Pelosi, but they will not choose her successor. Instead, in the chaos that would follow a Pelosi defeat, the speakership will probably go to the second-highest member of the Democratic hierarchy: Steny Hoyer.
End Game
The left is distressed with Pelosi, and that’s understandable. Pelosi’s commitment to “pay as you go” funding is a political and procedural mistake of the first order. The new tax rule is, as MoveOn.org and others have said, “a staggeringly bad idea”—although that may have been forced on her by the Five Guys crowd. (Progressives should note, however, that this rule could be waived at any time to pass progressive programs.)
A Hoyer speakership would be a catastrophe for the left, for reasons Politico’s Bill Scher lays out here. Hoyer represents the worst of the corporate-backed, “centrist,” economically neoliberal party elite. His faction’s disastrous policies and muddled messaging led it into the political wilderness. With this election, the party has only begun to make up some of the ground lost under its rule.
Progressives should mobilize to defeat Hoyer and replace him, preferably someone who can serve as an heir apparent. And if the left wants a more progressive House Speaker, it needs to run candidates in more primaries. When House Democrats are more progressive, Pelosi or her successor will either change accordingly or be replaced.
Yes, Pelosi’s a big fundraiser. She reportedly raised $135.6 million for this election cycle. A cynic might say that this figure, when compared to Moulton’s $8 million, makes her about 17 times more likely to win this speakership fight.
Pelosi raises that money, from a variety of sources, because she plays to win in the current system. Nancy Pelosi can’t, and won’t, lead the fight to get money out of politics. But then, the Democratic left needs to stop waiting for politicians to fight their battles. That’s what movements are for.
This country needs a mass movement that will demand fundamental political change. But nobody needs the Five Guys’ corporate-backed chaos, or the reactionary regime it seeks to impose on the House of Representatives.
If some leftists don’t want Pelosi to win, that’s understandable. But they should hope with all their hearts that her opponents lose.
Chuck Schumer Caved to Facebook and Donald Trump. He Shouldn’t Lead Senate Democrats.
Mehdi Hasan - the intercept
November 16 2018, 9:38 a.m.
IT WASN’T Donald Trump who said he opposed the nuclear deal with Iran because “we will be worse off with this agreement than without it,” while lying about the contents of that deal.
It wasn’t Mike Pence who said that “since the Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas … to strangle them economically until they see that’s not the way to go makes sense.”
It wasn’t John Bolton who voted for the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2002, saying that Saddam Hussein was engaged in a “vigorous pursuit of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.”
It wasn’t Mike Pompeo who said, “It’s easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used. But when you’re in the foxhole, it’s a very different deal.”
It wasn’t Stephen Miller who responded to the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris by suggesting “a pause may be necessary” in the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States.
It wasn’t Betsy DeVos who joined a group of finance industry executives for breakfast only a few weeks after the 2008 financial crash and told them, “We are not going to be a bunch of crazy, anti-business liberals.”
Forget the hawks, blowhards, and kakistocrats of the Trump administration. You know who made all these statements? It was Chuck Schumer.
Yes, the fourth-term Democratic senator from New York has a long history of making really right-wing and rancid remarks. Yet on Wednesday morning, Schumer was re-elected as minority leader by acclamation in a closed-door meeting of Senate Democrats. They didn’t even bother to vote on it.
By Wednesday evening, though, the New York Times had published a blockbuster investigation into Facebook, which reminded us how Schumer, in the words of my colleague Glenn Greenwald, “has long been the embodiment of everything sleazy, legally corrupt, corporatist and craven in Washington.”
What did the Times say about the newly re-elected Senate minority leader?
In at least one instance, the company also relied on Mr. Schumer, the New York senator and Senate Democratic leader. He has long worked to advance Silicon Valley’s interests on issues such as commercial drone regulations and patent reform. During the 2016 election cycle, he raised more money from Facebook employees than any other member of Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Mr. Schumer also has a personal connection to Facebook: His daughter Alison joined the firm out of college and is now a marketing manager in Facebook’s New York office, according to her LinkedIn profile.
In July, as Facebook’s troubles threatened to cost the company billions of dollars in market value, Mr. Schumer confronted [Sen. Mark] Warner, by then Facebook’s most insistent inquisitor in Congress.
Back off, he told Mr. Warner, according to a Facebook employee briefed on Mr. Schumer’s intervention. Mr. Warner should be looking for ways to work with Facebook, Mr. Schumer advised, not harm it. Facebook lobbyists were kept abreast of Mr. Schumer’s efforts to protect the company, according to the employee.
To be clear: The leader of the Senate Democrats tried to bully a fellow Democratic senator to “back off” from investigating a company where his daughter works and which gives him more money than any other member of Congress. Why isn’t this a bigger story? How is this not a resigning issue?
Remember, there are, as of right now, 47 elected Senate Democrats. Almost any of them — with the glaring exception of the pretend-Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia — would do a better job of leading the party than Schumer.
As I argued earlier this week, the next two years in U.S. politics will be a 24/7 battle for the future of American democracy; a relentless fight against fascism, racism, and white nationalism. Are we really expected to believe that Schumer will be the leader of the #Resistance in the Senate ? Don’t make me laugh.
In January 2017, Trump nominated the hawkish Mike Pompeo, who has ties to a far-right network of Islamophobes, to serve as director of the CIA. Schumer’s response? He voted in favor of Pompeo.
In April 2017 and then again in April 2018, Trump launched airstrikes against the Assad regime in Syria. Schumer’s response? He backed both sets of strikes, calling the first “the right thing to do” and the second “appropriate.”
In February 2018, Trump signed off “on the biggest budget the Pentagon has ever seen: $700 billion.” Schumer’s response? “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request,” his office announced.
In May 2018, Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, in defiance of the international community. Schumer’s response? “In a long overdue move, we have moved our embassy to Jerusalem,” he declared, adding: “I applaud President Trump for doing it.”
In August 2018, prior to the Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Trump nominated a bunch of new judges to fill vacancies in a number of federal district courts. Schumer’s response? As Vox reported, the Senate minority leader “reached an agreement late Tuesday with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to fast-track the confirmations of 15 Trump-nominated judicial picks.”
In October 2018, a Trump supporter sent a pipe bomb in the mail to George Soros, a billionaire donor to liberal causes. The California office of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy was vandalized a couple of days earlier. Schumer’s response to these incidents?
He tweeted:
Make no mistake: Despicable acts of violence and harassment are being carried out by radicals across the political spectrum—not just by one side. Regardless of who is responsible, these acts are wrong and must be condemned by Democrats and Republicans alike. Period.
To be clear, property damage is not the moral equivalent of an assassination attempt. Trump supporters have carried out a long list of terrorist attacks — incited or inspired, on multiple occasions, by the president himself.
Schumer’s craven response? Both sides!
This isn’t resistance; this is collaboration. The Senate minority leader is a cautious and conservative politician who prefers to make deals, not noise. He avoids confrontation and likes to schmooze Republican friends while in the Senate gym. He is, to quote from the headline of a New York Times profile published a few months after the financial crash, a “champion of Wall Street.”
For the corrupt and lawless Trump, having his old friend Schumer — to whom he has donated thousands of dollars — in charge of the Senate Democrats is a blessing. Schumer is bent on negotiating with this president, whether over immigration reform or infrastructure. That Trump can’t be trusted, or that Trump is leading a white nationalist movement from the White House, doesn’t seem to bother him. As one of the young organizers of a November 2016 protest at the Senate office of the minority leader told the Village Voice: “What’s really dangerous about Chuck Schumer and the Democratic leadership is they don’t understand the stakes of what’s happening in this country.”
“Dangerous” is the correct word. Schumer has voted in favor of Trump cabinet appointees and Trump judicial appointees. He has downplayed the threat posed by the more deranged members of the Trump base by equating it to nonviolent protests from the left. And he refuses to talk impeachment.
So what happens if the president, in a desperate attempt to deflect from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report or a future recession, decides to do something crazy? To start, say, a war with Iran? Do you think the senator from New York, who wrote a blank check for former President George W. Bush in 2002, is going to stand in Trump’s way?
Schumer may have since regretted his vote in favor of the Iraq invasion, but he has never disowned the warped thinking behind it. “Today,” he wrote in “Positively American,” his 2008 book, “I still believe that when our country is under attack the chief executive deserves a degree of latitude. If God forbid, we were attacked again, I could well vote to give it to a future president, Democrat or Republican.”
Deferential. Cowardly. Feckless. Craven. Corrupt. Complicit. Pick your own combination of words to describe Chuck Schumer. The biggest problem we all face is that the Democrats in the upper chamber of Congress have already picked theirs: “Senate minority leader.”
It wasn’t Mike Pence who said that “since the Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas … to strangle them economically until they see that’s not the way to go makes sense.”
It wasn’t John Bolton who voted for the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2002, saying that Saddam Hussein was engaged in a “vigorous pursuit of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.”
It wasn’t Mike Pompeo who said, “It’s easy to sit back in the armchair and say that torture can never be used. But when you’re in the foxhole, it’s a very different deal.”
It wasn’t Stephen Miller who responded to the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris by suggesting “a pause may be necessary” in the resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States.
It wasn’t Betsy DeVos who joined a group of finance industry executives for breakfast only a few weeks after the 2008 financial crash and told them, “We are not going to be a bunch of crazy, anti-business liberals.”
Forget the hawks, blowhards, and kakistocrats of the Trump administration. You know who made all these statements? It was Chuck Schumer.
Yes, the fourth-term Democratic senator from New York has a long history of making really right-wing and rancid remarks. Yet on Wednesday morning, Schumer was re-elected as minority leader by acclamation in a closed-door meeting of Senate Democrats. They didn’t even bother to vote on it.
By Wednesday evening, though, the New York Times had published a blockbuster investigation into Facebook, which reminded us how Schumer, in the words of my colleague Glenn Greenwald, “has long been the embodiment of everything sleazy, legally corrupt, corporatist and craven in Washington.”
What did the Times say about the newly re-elected Senate minority leader?
In at least one instance, the company also relied on Mr. Schumer, the New York senator and Senate Democratic leader. He has long worked to advance Silicon Valley’s interests on issues such as commercial drone regulations and patent reform. During the 2016 election cycle, he raised more money from Facebook employees than any other member of Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Mr. Schumer also has a personal connection to Facebook: His daughter Alison joined the firm out of college and is now a marketing manager in Facebook’s New York office, according to her LinkedIn profile.
In July, as Facebook’s troubles threatened to cost the company billions of dollars in market value, Mr. Schumer confronted [Sen. Mark] Warner, by then Facebook’s most insistent inquisitor in Congress.
Back off, he told Mr. Warner, according to a Facebook employee briefed on Mr. Schumer’s intervention. Mr. Warner should be looking for ways to work with Facebook, Mr. Schumer advised, not harm it. Facebook lobbyists were kept abreast of Mr. Schumer’s efforts to protect the company, according to the employee.
To be clear: The leader of the Senate Democrats tried to bully a fellow Democratic senator to “back off” from investigating a company where his daughter works and which gives him more money than any other member of Congress. Why isn’t this a bigger story? How is this not a resigning issue?
Remember, there are, as of right now, 47 elected Senate Democrats. Almost any of them — with the glaring exception of the pretend-Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia — would do a better job of leading the party than Schumer.
As I argued earlier this week, the next two years in U.S. politics will be a 24/7 battle for the future of American democracy; a relentless fight against fascism, racism, and white nationalism. Are we really expected to believe that Schumer will be the leader of the #Resistance in the Senate ? Don’t make me laugh.
In January 2017, Trump nominated the hawkish Mike Pompeo, who has ties to a far-right network of Islamophobes, to serve as director of the CIA. Schumer’s response? He voted in favor of Pompeo.
In April 2017 and then again in April 2018, Trump launched airstrikes against the Assad regime in Syria. Schumer’s response? He backed both sets of strikes, calling the first “the right thing to do” and the second “appropriate.”
In February 2018, Trump signed off “on the biggest budget the Pentagon has ever seen: $700 billion.” Schumer’s response? “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request,” his office announced.
In May 2018, Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, in defiance of the international community. Schumer’s response? “In a long overdue move, we have moved our embassy to Jerusalem,” he declared, adding: “I applaud President Trump for doing it.”
In August 2018, prior to the Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Trump nominated a bunch of new judges to fill vacancies in a number of federal district courts. Schumer’s response? As Vox reported, the Senate minority leader “reached an agreement late Tuesday with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to fast-track the confirmations of 15 Trump-nominated judicial picks.”
In October 2018, a Trump supporter sent a pipe bomb in the mail to George Soros, a billionaire donor to liberal causes. The California office of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy was vandalized a couple of days earlier. Schumer’s response to these incidents?
He tweeted:
Make no mistake: Despicable acts of violence and harassment are being carried out by radicals across the political spectrum—not just by one side. Regardless of who is responsible, these acts are wrong and must be condemned by Democrats and Republicans alike. Period.
To be clear, property damage is not the moral equivalent of an assassination attempt. Trump supporters have carried out a long list of terrorist attacks — incited or inspired, on multiple occasions, by the president himself.
Schumer’s craven response? Both sides!
This isn’t resistance; this is collaboration. The Senate minority leader is a cautious and conservative politician who prefers to make deals, not noise. He avoids confrontation and likes to schmooze Republican friends while in the Senate gym. He is, to quote from the headline of a New York Times profile published a few months after the financial crash, a “champion of Wall Street.”
For the corrupt and lawless Trump, having his old friend Schumer — to whom he has donated thousands of dollars — in charge of the Senate Democrats is a blessing. Schumer is bent on negotiating with this president, whether over immigration reform or infrastructure. That Trump can’t be trusted, or that Trump is leading a white nationalist movement from the White House, doesn’t seem to bother him. As one of the young organizers of a November 2016 protest at the Senate office of the minority leader told the Village Voice: “What’s really dangerous about Chuck Schumer and the Democratic leadership is they don’t understand the stakes of what’s happening in this country.”
“Dangerous” is the correct word. Schumer has voted in favor of Trump cabinet appointees and Trump judicial appointees. He has downplayed the threat posed by the more deranged members of the Trump base by equating it to nonviolent protests from the left. And he refuses to talk impeachment.
So what happens if the president, in a desperate attempt to deflect from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report or a future recession, decides to do something crazy? To start, say, a war with Iran? Do you think the senator from New York, who wrote a blank check for former President George W. Bush in 2002, is going to stand in Trump’s way?
Schumer may have since regretted his vote in favor of the Iraq invasion, but he has never disowned the warped thinking behind it. “Today,” he wrote in “Positively American,” his 2008 book, “I still believe that when our country is under attack the chief executive deserves a degree of latitude. If God forbid, we were attacked again, I could well vote to give it to a future president, Democrat or Republican.”
Deferential. Cowardly. Feckless. Craven. Corrupt. Complicit. Pick your own combination of words to describe Chuck Schumer. The biggest problem we all face is that the Democrats in the upper chamber of Congress have already picked theirs: “Senate minority leader.”
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.
DEMOCRATS WHO VOTED TO DEREGULATE WALL STREET GOT WIPED OUT IN A SETBACK FOR BANK LOBBYISTS
David Dayen - the intercept
November 10 2018, 7:22 a.m
THE MOST HIGH-PROFILE bipartisan legislation of the Trump era turned out to be electoral poison — or at least, not a prophylactic — for the Senate Democrats who decided to support it, which could serve as a lesson for party leaders wishing to join with the president on other bills next year.
The “Crapo bill,” a bank deregulation measure co-authored by Senate Banking Committee chair Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and several centrist Democrats, passed Congress this spring with the help of 17 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus and 33 House Democrats.
In the 10 states where Donald Trump won in 2016 and a Democratic senator stood for re-election this year, the three who opposed the Crapo bill all won a greater share of votes in their states than the seven who voted for it. Senators voting “no” averaged 54.7 percent of the vote and won by 10 percentage points, while the “yes” votes averaged 48.1 percent and lost by 1.5 points. The only Republican who lost, Dean Heller of Nevada, also voted for the Crapo bill, and fell by 5 points to Jacky Rosen, who voted against the legislation in the House.
The Crapo bill rolled back a number of elements of the Dodd-Frank Act, including, in particular, stiffer regulations on banks that have between $50 billion and $250 billion in assets. A recent proposal from the Federal Reserve, using authority granted by the Crapo bill, expands that deregulation up to banks with as much as $700 billion in assets.
Senate Democratic supporters justified their votes by casting the legislation as a tweak to benefit community banks in small towns and rural areas, despite its greatest impact occurring well up the chain. In fact, the bill has already led to accelerated consolidation and further disappearance of community banks.
In reality, the Democrats’ rationale was likely more cynical: They thought supporting the bill would unlock campaign contributions from the financial industry. And they were right.
The three Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee who co-authored the legislation — North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, and Montana’s Jon Tester — became the top three senators for financial industry donations in 2017, as the bill was being written. By the end of the cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the largest Senate recipients of campaign money from commercial banks were Heitkamp ($320,891), Tester ($274,944), bill supporter Claire McCaskill ($236,743), and Donnelly ($232,966). A little behind them was the Democratic Senate candidate from Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema ($173,204), who voted for the Crapo bill in the House.
The American Bankers Association ran an ad for Tester, and Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded group, launched a spot thanking Heitkamp for her vote. The Independent Community Bankers of America sent mailers for both Democrats.
By contrast, three more liberal Democrats running in Trump states — Bob Casey of Pennsylvania; Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin; and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, ranking member of the Banking Committee — decided that it wasn’t worth increasing industry donations by deregulating the banking sector. Their own results showed them to be right.
The following chart lists the share of the total vote each Senate Democrat running in a Trump state earned in the election, based on CNN’s numbers as of November 8. Casey, Baldwin, and Brown were the biggest winners, followed by Debbie Stabenow, who ran in a state more Democratic on Tuesday than Ohio but received a smaller percentage of the vote. Heitkamp and Donnelly, two of the co-authors of the Crapo bill, lost their races, as did McCaskill; Nelson’s race is headed to a re-count.
Heller, who was the top Republican in terms of commercial banking industry donations ($227,325), also did poorly, losing his race.
None of this is to say that the banking bill was the primary cause of defeat or sluggish performance on Election Day; there were far more important factors, from the relative conservative lean of the states, to the Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation vote, to Trump’s racist fearmongering.
But the rationale for supporters was that voting for the Crapo bill would help them electorally. Not only could they tout working together on bipartisan relief for local lenders, but they could haul in campaign donations to outpace their rivals. This was the myth that was proven wrong by the results.
Casey, Baldwin, and Brown didn’t chase the banker cash, and they did fine — better, in fact, than those who did. That shows that deregulating the financial industry was unnecessary as a political tool. To quote Adam Jentleson, former deputy chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, it was “One of the all-time stupidest votes. This bill had no business passing.”
The industry took notice of the stumbles of their Democratic backers in Congress as well. Ian Katz, a partner at Capital Alpha Partners, told Politico, “Since so many moderate Dems who supported S. 2155 lost, it may now be harder to get the Dems needed to get to 60 on financial services legislation. … It would be hard for Dem senators to think that cooperating with Republicans on financial policy is helpful to winning re-election.”
It will be interesting to see whether that point resonates with the Democratic leadership. Already, there’s been chatter in some circles about bipartisan cooperation with Trump on infrastructure spending or bills to lower the cost of prescription drugs. The devil would be in the details with those bills, but the idea that Democrats must show that they can reach across the aisle, particularly in pursuit of industry friendly deregulation, would seem to be disproven by this outcome.
Moreover, the new crop of freshman Democrats must consider the real value of Wall Street cash as well. It’s long been tradition to drop freshmen onto the House Financial Services Committee as a way to cultivate relationships with big-money lobbyists and shake down the industry for donations. The banks want something in return for that, and this leads to round after round of bipartisan deregulation. The midterm results show that such shilling for Big Finance has little utility in present-day elections.
The “Crapo bill,” a bank deregulation measure co-authored by Senate Banking Committee chair Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and several centrist Democrats, passed Congress this spring with the help of 17 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus and 33 House Democrats.
In the 10 states where Donald Trump won in 2016 and a Democratic senator stood for re-election this year, the three who opposed the Crapo bill all won a greater share of votes in their states than the seven who voted for it. Senators voting “no” averaged 54.7 percent of the vote and won by 10 percentage points, while the “yes” votes averaged 48.1 percent and lost by 1.5 points. The only Republican who lost, Dean Heller of Nevada, also voted for the Crapo bill, and fell by 5 points to Jacky Rosen, who voted against the legislation in the House.
The Crapo bill rolled back a number of elements of the Dodd-Frank Act, including, in particular, stiffer regulations on banks that have between $50 billion and $250 billion in assets. A recent proposal from the Federal Reserve, using authority granted by the Crapo bill, expands that deregulation up to banks with as much as $700 billion in assets.
Senate Democratic supporters justified their votes by casting the legislation as a tweak to benefit community banks in small towns and rural areas, despite its greatest impact occurring well up the chain. In fact, the bill has already led to accelerated consolidation and further disappearance of community banks.
In reality, the Democrats’ rationale was likely more cynical: They thought supporting the bill would unlock campaign contributions from the financial industry. And they were right.
The three Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee who co-authored the legislation — North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, and Montana’s Jon Tester — became the top three senators for financial industry donations in 2017, as the bill was being written. By the end of the cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the largest Senate recipients of campaign money from commercial banks were Heitkamp ($320,891), Tester ($274,944), bill supporter Claire McCaskill ($236,743), and Donnelly ($232,966). A little behind them was the Democratic Senate candidate from Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema ($173,204), who voted for the Crapo bill in the House.
The American Bankers Association ran an ad for Tester, and Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded group, launched a spot thanking Heitkamp for her vote. The Independent Community Bankers of America sent mailers for both Democrats.
By contrast, three more liberal Democrats running in Trump states — Bob Casey of Pennsylvania; Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin; and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, ranking member of the Banking Committee — decided that it wasn’t worth increasing industry donations by deregulating the banking sector. Their own results showed them to be right.
The following chart lists the share of the total vote each Senate Democrat running in a Trump state earned in the election, based on CNN’s numbers as of November 8. Casey, Baldwin, and Brown were the biggest winners, followed by Debbie Stabenow, who ran in a state more Democratic on Tuesday than Ohio but received a smaller percentage of the vote. Heitkamp and Donnelly, two of the co-authors of the Crapo bill, lost their races, as did McCaskill; Nelson’s race is headed to a re-count.
Heller, who was the top Republican in terms of commercial banking industry donations ($227,325), also did poorly, losing his race.
None of this is to say that the banking bill was the primary cause of defeat or sluggish performance on Election Day; there were far more important factors, from the relative conservative lean of the states, to the Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation vote, to Trump’s racist fearmongering.
But the rationale for supporters was that voting for the Crapo bill would help them electorally. Not only could they tout working together on bipartisan relief for local lenders, but they could haul in campaign donations to outpace their rivals. This was the myth that was proven wrong by the results.
Casey, Baldwin, and Brown didn’t chase the banker cash, and they did fine — better, in fact, than those who did. That shows that deregulating the financial industry was unnecessary as a political tool. To quote Adam Jentleson, former deputy chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, it was “One of the all-time stupidest votes. This bill had no business passing.”
The industry took notice of the stumbles of their Democratic backers in Congress as well. Ian Katz, a partner at Capital Alpha Partners, told Politico, “Since so many moderate Dems who supported S. 2155 lost, it may now be harder to get the Dems needed to get to 60 on financial services legislation. … It would be hard for Dem senators to think that cooperating with Republicans on financial policy is helpful to winning re-election.”
It will be interesting to see whether that point resonates with the Democratic leadership. Already, there’s been chatter in some circles about bipartisan cooperation with Trump on infrastructure spending or bills to lower the cost of prescription drugs. The devil would be in the details with those bills, but the idea that Democrats must show that they can reach across the aisle, particularly in pursuit of industry friendly deregulation, would seem to be disproven by this outcome.
Moreover, the new crop of freshman Democrats must consider the real value of Wall Street cash as well. It’s long been tradition to drop freshmen onto the House Financial Services Committee as a way to cultivate relationships with big-money lobbyists and shake down the industry for donations. The banks want something in return for that, and this leads to round after round of bipartisan deregulation. The midterm results show that such shilling for Big Finance has little utility in present-day elections.
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
|
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
|
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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