This New Dem Careerist Crap Really Pisses Me Off

 

I was speaking with a congressional candidate the other day. And she asked me if I know a particular member of Congress who had called her recently. I never met the fellow but I do know he's a corporate-friendly New Dem with an "F" rating from ProgressivePunch-- and in a ultra-safe blue district (D+over 20) that was designed to suck up every Democrat in the area to make it safer for 4 Republican incumbents by making sure their districts would be less competitive.

In any case, what did this New Dem want from the progressive? Was it to make a contribution to her campaign? Nah. But he had some advise for her: he chastised her for not taking PAC money-- even though she had out-raised her opponent without the money that comes with strings attached (which is how the congressman finances his own career).

And the other advise was even more offensive. She told me that the person who has done the most for her campaign has been Bernie Sanders, who has sent fundraising letters and done on-line events with her. The congressman wanted to warn her that if she was seen to be associating with Bernie, it would hurt her efforts to get elected.

This isn't even sound advice on the surface. There are 3 counties with almost all the people in her district. Two of the three-- including the biggest one-- all went for Bernie in 2016 and again in 2020. This isn't an area looking for a conservative, status-quo Democrat. His district isn't either. Democratic turnout in his district is pathetic, just a fraction of what it should be. He's very lucky there are so few Republicans there.

I spoke to other progressive candidates who have told me they've gotten very similar advice from incumbents, usually New Dems! "Go light on the anti-PAC message" and "Don't play up the Bernie association." Advice from the DCCC consultants is even harsher and more vile-- both in terms of the content and in the ways the content is delivered, especially to women candidates who always seem to get talked down to by these DCCC consultants. (I thought they put Bustos into therapy to make her less of a bigot. I guess it either didn't work or she didn't realize she was supposed to instill decency into her co-workers and consultants.)

The Democratic Party is going to need serious, committed men and women in Congress, not a bunch of worthless careerists who are serious about nothing but how to get reelected and not committed to anything but themselves. The DCCC candidates, for the most part, don't make the grade. I was just reading how Trump's plan is to leave Biden with a poison pill that will take candidates who are going to fight to win-- the way Pramila Jayapal and Ted Lieu and Jamie Raskin do and not whimper like a bunch of Third Way/Problem Solver/New Dem weenies. Andrew Feinberg reported that "The order, which the White House released late Wednesday evening, would strip civil service protections from a broad swath of career civil servants if it is decided that they are in 'confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating positions'-- a description previously reserved for the political appointees who come and go with each change in administration. It does that by creating a new category for such positions that do not turn over from administration to administration and reclassifying them as part of that category.  The Office of Personnel Management-- essentially the executive branch’s human resources department-- has been charged with implementing the order by publishing a 'preliminary' list of positions to be moved into the new category on what could President Donald Trump’s last full day in office: January 19, 2021."

The range of workers who could be stripped of protections and placed in this new category is vast, experts say, and could include most of the non-partisan experts-- scientists, doctors, lawyers, economists-- whose work to advise and inform policymakers is supposed to be done in a way that is fact-driven and devoid of politics. Trump has repeatedly clashed with such career workers on a variety of settings, ranging from his desire to present the Covid-19 pandemic as largely over, to his attempts to enable his allies to escape punishment for federal crimes, to his quixotic insistence that National Weather Service scientists back up his erroneous claim that the state of Alabama was threatened by a hurricane which was not heading in its direction.

Creating the new category-- known as “Schedule F”-- and moving current civil servants into it could allow a lame-duck President Trump to cripple his successor’s administration by firing any career federal employees who’ve been included on the list. It also could allow Trump administration officials to skirt prohibitions against “burrowing in”-- the heavily restricted practice of converting political appointees (known as “Schedule C” employees) into career civil servants-- by hiring them under the new category for positions which would not end with Trump’s term. Another provision orders agencies to take steps to prohibit removing “Schedule F” appointees from their jobs on the grounds of “political affiliation,” which could potentially prevent a future administration from firing unqualified appointees because of their association with President Trump.

“It's a two-pronged attack-- a Hail Mary pass to enable them to do some burrowing in if they lose the election,” said Walter Shaub, who ran the US Office of Government Ethics during the last four years of the Obama administration and first six months of the Trump administration. “But if they win the election, then anything goes for the destruction of the civil service… [This could] take us back to the spoils system and all the corruption that comes with it.”

Shaub explained that at the core of it, a non-partisan civil service is one of the most basic anti-corruption measures that any government can implement “because they free federal employees to disobey illegal orders, be ethical, and resist fraud, waste, and abuse.”

“Taking those away creates a cadre of people who are either too intimidated by or loyal to a politician instead of the rule of law and the Constitution,” he said. “That’s the goal here.”

It's why I've been advocating declaring that Trump was an illegitimate president and that everything he did is null and void-- a kind of modern day Damnatio Memoriae. That's a job for progressives, not careerist centrists.

Audrey isn't the candidate I spoke to about the New Dem phone call but I just saw her new TV ad and thought it fit--exactly what a DCCC consultant would tell her not to run: