What's To Be Done About The Disease On The Body Politic Named Debbie Wasserman Schultz?

The Democratic Party stood for something we could all be proud of... before these two took over

Yesterday, a few hours before Bernie told Jake Tapper he would fire Wasserman Schultz if he were elected and that he would support Tim Canova over her in the primary, the Courage Campaign emailed their members that "the big Wall Street banks have a new best friend in Washington. Her name is Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and she's the head of the Democratic National Committee. Representative Wasserman Schultz has raised millions of dollars from big banks. And now she's co-sponsoring legislation to block Senator Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from cracking down on predatory payday lenders." They wrote that they're "turning up the heat" on her and "demanding that the CFPB be allowed to stop predatory payday lenders." They forgot to mention, though, that the way-- probably the only way-- to stop Wasserman Schultz and the corrupt "bipartisan" cabal around her is to replace her in her Broward/Miami-Dade district with Tim Canova on August 30, the day of Florida's congressional primaries.

The thermometer on the right is where you can go to contribute to Canova's grassroots campaign-- a campaign that is on fire. The Courage campaign continued to explain, as Canova has for the past 6 months that "after the 2008 financial crash, Sen. Warren created the CFPB under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform package to protect American consumers from the financial industries' scams and ripoffs, like the payday loan industry. Payday lenders are notoriously-predatory short-term loan operations that target low-income communities and communities of color to charge interest rates that would make a loan shark blush. It's exactly the kind of abusive behavior that inspired Sen. Warren to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the first place. Unless top Democrats like Rep. Wasserman Schultz team up with Republicans in Congress to block the CFPB, we are confident that the CFPB will lay down the law with payday lenders. That's why it's so important that we keep up the pressure to hold Rep. Wasserman Schultz accountable-- and show other Democrats that we won't stand for this kind of behavior." Nothing will send that message more strongly and definitively than helping Canova to defeat her in the primary.

Bill Moyers had a few choice words for #DebtTrapDebbie this weekend as well, beginning with how the Democrats will never be able to unify if she's running the DNC. "She embodies the tactics that have eroded the ability of Democrats to once again be the party of the working class. As Democratic National Committee chair she has opened the floodgates for Big Money, brought lobbyists into the inner circle and oiled all the moving parts of the revolving door that twirls between government service and cushy jobs in the world of corporate influence. And that ain’t all. As a member of Congress, particularly egregious has been her support of the payday loan business, defying new regulations from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that would rein in an industry that soaks desperate borrowers. As President Obama said, 'While payday loans might seem like easy money, folks often end up trapped in a cycle of debt.'"

Rep. Wasserman Schultz is facing a primary challenge for the first time this year, her opponent a law professor, activist and progressive Sanders supporter named Tim Canova. But the primary’s not until late August, long after the Democratic National Convention. Unless she steps down now or Hillary Clinton has her removed, Philadelphia will be dominated by someone who represents everything that has gone wrong with the Democratic Party and Washington. At the convention’s opening session, Debbie Wasserman Schultz will be bringing the gavel down squarely on progressive hopes of returning the party to its legacy as champion of working people and the dispossessed.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Time for her to go.

Friday The Hill wrote of an army of Sanders supporters fuming over Wasserman Schultz. Many of these people "blame Wasserman Schultz for what they see as system rigged against their candidate and say he is being cheated by contests closed to independents and unfair weight to superdelegates."

The feud between Wasserman Schultz and Sanders has been going for some time.

The Sanders campaign has criticized a DNC debate schedule that put contests on weekend nights, when they were less likely to garner viewers.

Late last year, Sanders sued the DNC after the party briefly blocked the Sanders campaign's access to party files and data following a report that Sanders staffers had improperly accessed Clinton's campaign information.

The Sanders campaign dropped the lawsuit in late April.

Two weeks ago, Sanders sent a letter to the chairwoman accusing the party for giving Clinton supporters more committee representation at the July convention. Wasserman Schultz denied that the DNC is favoring the former secretary of State.

Liberal commentator Van Jones said this week on CNN that he’d prefer Reince Priebus, Republican National Committee chairman, over Wasserman Schultz after a “leadership failure” for Democrats.

“Debbie, who should be the umpire, who should be the marriage counselor, is coming in harder for Hillary Clinton than she is for herself. That is malpractice,” Jones told CNN's Brooke Baldwin Wednesday.

And Mika Brzezinski, the co-host on MSNBC's Morning Joe, said the DNC chair should “step down,” condemning the party’s treatment of Sanders since he entered the race.

“This has been very poorly handled from the start. It has been unfair, and they haven’t taken him seriously, and it starts, quite frankly, with the person we just heard speaking. It just does. You know that,” Brzezinski said about Wasserman Schultz.

A former DNC official noted that party members selected Wasserman Schultz as DNC chair and said that it's easy for campaigns to shift the blame onto her since she's the face of the party.

“Something that’s getting lost in a lot of this discussion is that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a democratically elected chair of the party,” said Holly Shulman, a former DNC spokeswoman and now Democratic consultant. “Democrats elected her to lead the party, and that’s what she’s doing.

Like every word ever uttered by Holly Shulman, that's another establishment lie, meant to mislead people, including an imbecile Hill writer, too naive to challenge it. Wassermann Schultz was selected by Obama and rubber-stamped by a gaggle of establishment ass-lickers.

As for the army of angry Bernie supporters, will they connect the dots that connect how they feel about Wasserman Schultz to defeating her in the primary (especially a primary a month after the national convention)? I wish I was more sure they would. Bernie won a landslide victory in Orgeon last week. Grassroots power propelled him to a 320,746 (56.0%) to 251,739 (44.0%) victory over the establishment candidate. BUT... the Berniecrat running in the 5th district, Dave McTeague, didn't fare all that well in his race against the odious chief Blue Dog Kurt Schrader. Schrader was able to outspend McTeague $442,433 to $30,629 and Schrader beat him 62,046 (72.9%) to 23,107 (27.1%). Bernie won all 7 of the counties in the fifth congressional district. His coattails didn't do much for McTeague in any of them. Pretty dismal and there's no other way to interpret it than that Bernie supporters didn't pay enough attention to vote down-ballot for the candidate running on his platform. This is bad. But not necessarily predictive of what's going to happen in Florida.

Canova is running a far more viable campaign and where McTeague only managed to raise $31,620, Canova has already raised over a million dollars, all of it from small grassroots donors (like us). And Canova is more adapt than most of the other Berniecrat campaigns around the country at making sure his message gets out to voters. When Wasserman Schultz puked out her latest distorted and hate-filled message about Canova's prowess of raising money outside the bounds of Beltway norms-- unlike her, he takes small contributions from people who want a better government, not from special interest PACs and corporations buying access to one of Congress' most corrupt members-- he struck back immediately:

After another rough week for Debbie Wasserman Schultz, her campaign sent an email to her supporters... Not only does it attack our campaign for refusing to take money from corporations or wealthy billionaires, but it accuses people like you of "spinning a web of distortions" about our opponent’s anti-progressive record. This is further proof that not only do we have her attention, but she is increasingly worried about our growing movement. With just months to go, our campaign needs your support now more than ever.

...It’s alarming that the Chairwoman of the Democratic Party thinks it wise to attack progressives for funding a campaign with small-dollar contributions. Even so, we actually received more donations in Florida than Wasserman Schultz! It speaks volumes about the kind of leader she’s been for the party when she’s more concerned about contributions of $18 than big donations of $10,000 from Goldman Sachs executives.

If you’re sick and tired of Wasserman Schultz standing with Republicans and huge corporations against progressives and working Americans, then join our campaign in sending a message that our voices will no longer be silenced by the establishment.

I cannot win this election alone. I need your continued help and support to overcome the odds.

That's where we come in. Let's make sure Wasserman Schultz goes back to live permanently in her district and is never again in a position to sell out working families and Democratic Party values in DC: