Do Democrats in DC Get Neutered Before Taking Up Residence?

It seems like it's been decades since gruesomely conflicted Beltway Democrats, struggling with the absurdity of trying to maintain a Big Tent-- and keep the corporate money flowing-- had the courage of their convictions and even a modicum of, as Hemmingway put it, grace under fire. Instead of bold leadership, we've come to expect weak, pale compromises as a matter of course. Yesterday Conrad was in total Beltway mindset-- trading some cheap temporary tax increases for giving the far right their 7 and a half decades long dream-- opening the door of dissolving the social compact embodied by Social Security. "But the Senate’s vote coupled with Democrats’ willingness to give ground on entitlement cuts would make the pressure to compromise exceptionally strong, Conrad said." That isn't a Democrat; that's a Beltway Democrat.

Beltway Democrats are so insecure that they're always rooting around in the intellectual garbage bin of Republicanism finding terrible GOP ideas to claim as their own. Now we have Democrats stuck with a complicated, shady loser of an idea like widely unpopular healthcare mandates, a Republican concept from a time when "right wing" could be placed just about where the Beltway Democrats are today (the GOP have moved on to undreamed of places). Why didn't the Beltway Democrats pass single payer when they had a chance? Did they expect the GOP to support them? To be less vitriolic in their denunciations just because mandates were a (bad) Republican idea? These political hacks actually deserve the torment they've been served up. The fact that they're all that stands in between the rest of us and out-and-out fascism is nothing short of frightening-- especially when you consider that only 62 (+ Bernie Sanders) in the House and just one (Russ Feingold) in the Senate had the guts grace under imaginary fire to vote against Bush's fascist, unconstitutional and grotesquely misnamed Patriot Act in 2001.


Raul Grijalva reminded me this morning that Ed Markey had a much more progressive position on global warming that was widely backed by progressives but that the conservative cap-and-trade point of view became the "consensus" that progressives got stuck with by following Democratic Beltway leadership. This one-hand tied behind one's back position makes negotiations untenable. The progressive budget-- which is the only one of the 3 Democratic proposals calling for ending the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and the only one that actually calls for a concrete end of oil subsidies-- wasn't supported by The Leadership and now the official Democratic position (Van Hollen's conservative Establishment perspective is the House Democrats' alternative to the bizarre and extremist GOP bill.

Yesterday Ezra Klein asked (and answered) What went wrong with cap-and-trade? Another half-assed, long-discarded Republican halfway measure that was conceived to fail... embraced by clueless, cowardly, conflicted Beltway Democrats. Cap-and-trade was never a progressive solution; it was, at best, an enlightened conservative position-- perfect for the Beltway crowd:

A few years ago, cap-and-trade was, if not a consensus position in the Republican Party, then at least one with substantial support. John McCain had his own plan-- a plan he continued to promote through the 2008 election-- and he wasn’t, by any means, fighting a lonely battle. In fact, one of his co-sponsors was then-Sen. Barack Obama [the others: Lieberman and Snowe]. In the states, a number of Republican governors were also pursuing cap-and-trade plans, including Tim Pawlenty, who’s now running for president and has denounced his efforts to fight climate change as a terrible mistake.

On Wednesday in San Francisco President Obama called out climate change deniers in Congress. Though mostly Republicans, there are plenty of Blue Dogs and other ConservaDems who are just as guilty. Obama kept it general:

"There are climate change deniers in Congress and when the economy gets tough, sometimes environmental issues drop from people's radar screens," Obama told about 200 guests at the Pacific Heights residence of internet billionaire Marc Benioff, according to an official transcript. "But I don't think there's any doubt that unless we are able to move forward in a serious way on clean energy that we're putting our children and our grandchildren at risk. So that's not yet done."

Is cap-and-trade that "serious way?" It's certainly the conservative way-- as opposed to the reactionary way (denial).



David Spratt's book, Climate Code Red, is based on an idea Beltway Democrats order their lives around: habitual low expectations and a culture of failure. "There is an urgent need to understand global warming and the tipping points for dangerous impacts that we have already crossed as a sustainability emergency, that takes us beyond the politics of failure-inducing compromise. We are now in a race between climate tipping points and political tipping points." In an interview with Ross Garnaut, who was an advisor to the Australian Labor government at the time, Spratt makes the point that the business as usual Democratic approach to climate change-- although its core meaning could have just as well been said about any and all change Obama didn't deliver on-- is that "the essence of the solution is to recognize the need, based on the scientific imperatives, to de-carbonize the economy as fast as humanly possible, for the state and society to plan and support a rapid transition far beyond the speed at which market mechanisms can effectively work. Given the emergency speed at which this must be done, simply using price mechanisms will lead to a policy failure with catastrophic consequences for most people and most species.

"It is fatuous to believe that simple pricing/market mechanisms can achieve the wholesale restructuring of society in the decade or two we have to achieve this task before the falling dominoes of carbon cycle feedbacks start crashing around our ears, signalling that we have left it too late to stop the climate catastrophe sweeping far beyond the capacity of human action to further affect its trajectory."