Should The 2018 Midterms Just Be A Referendum On Trump? Or Do Democrats Have To Be Offering A Viable Alternative?

You thought the SNL sketch was funny? David Wade a former John Kerry chief of staff, now makes his living as a lobbyist (GreenLight Strategies) and Democratic strategist; über--establishment. He says Democrats can win back Congress next year "by making Donald Trump the issue in [suburban] districts. You can't allow any Republican incumbent to separate themselves from Trump's brand, period. Whether it's his failed promises, or his inability to do anything for the suburbs on basic quality of life issues from middle class taxes to health care costs to wages, you need to draw a straight line from the Republican incumbent to Trump."

Although Wade acknowledges that "Having acceptable candidates who fit their districts is important," he insists that Democrats "not pretend this is going to be anything but a referendum on Donald Trump. Ralph Northam didn’t just win out of abundance of charisma or because he had a vision. He won because Donald Trump was a millstone around Gillespie’s neck and Northam himself was acceptable to voters. We can’t be afraid to do that everywhere because with a president whose approval ratings are at a historic low, that’s how you win."

I asked Nancy Pelosi's daughter Christine, a savvy political operative in her own right, if she sees 2018 shaping up the same way. "I don't believe that," she told me. "I do believe this: Democrats win by showing voters how Trump's tax cuts for millionaires, billionaires, and big corporations slash Medicare, Medicaid, and education and cause harm in the daily lives of the American people." I asked a couple dozen Democrats the same question-- incumbents, candidates, campaign staffers, former members of Congress, etc. Each one said they disagree with Wade. One top Senate staffer, who asked for anonymity, told me that Schumer's pick of Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona shows that top Dems "still don't get it" and they think the wave will sweep even the worst Republican-lite candidates into office. "That worked out badly for us last year... [but] these know-it-alls never can't seem to admit their mistakes and therefore can't learn from them."

David Keith, currently residing in Racine and running Randy Bryce's camapign, is one of the most in-demand managers in the country. "What's fundamentally wrong about this line of thinking," he offered, "is that it takes voters for granted. It assumes voters don't have a soul, conscience, or values. This line of Beltway thinking goes part and parcel with the strategic flaws of 2016. We owe it to our better history to make something of this moment rather than use it as a moment to default. Voters are now-- more than ever-- very adept at calling bullshit. They may be calling Trump an irresponsible maniac now, but real soon they'll be looking for a remedy. Doing nothing is no remedy. It's a cause for an eye roll."

Tim Canova is working hard to unseat one of the evil forces propelling the Democratic Party in all the wrong directions, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. He has seen very clearly what happens when the party gives up its role as the vehicle for the legitimate aspirations of working men and women. "The surge of Democratic victories in last week’s elections shows what’s possible when candidates and voters organize around the issues and rally around a progressive agenda. We should be skeptical of claims by the Democratic establishment that the party can win back Congress by simply making 2018 a referendum on Donald Trump. They've been wrong so often in the past that we should question their assumptions, as well as their motives. The 'Trump referendum' strategy would serve the interests of the party’s corporate backers since, win or lose, it will have ensured a negative campaign that ignores progressive policy alternatives. The way back for Democrats is to embrace the party’s progressive roots to offer a compelling vision for our country. That’s what Philip Murphy did in winning the governor’s race in New Jersey, he campaigned for a state-run bank as part of his call to reject outdated economic ways and embrace innovative approaches. Yes, it’s important to oppose Trump and his regressive agenda. But at the same time, Democrats must offer voters real progressive alternatives."

Yesterday, Derrick Crowe, the top candidate for the open TX-21 seat, made a similar point. The primary pits him against a conservative "ex"-Republican multimillionaire, Joseph Kopser. On Saturday Bexar County (San Antonio) Democrats held their primary straw poll and Crowe beat Kopser better than 2 to 1. Saturday he told us that he had spent all day Friday in the heart of Texas Hill Country, "talking to voters about progressive policies like a $15/hour minimum wage and Medicare for All. Democrats and progressives respond to that message everywhere we go. Stating the obvious: this is a midterm, and midterms are about exciting, organizing, and turning out the base. Centrism crashes and burns this year. Progressive messages will be the winners."

Kara Eastman is running against the ultimate DCCC candidate-- a failed Republican politician, EXTREMELY conservative, who switched party registration and pretends to be a Blue Dog Democrat now, Brad Ashford, the perennial flip-flopper. He managed to fake his way into the Omaha congressional seat but was the worst Democrat in Congress, always voting with his Republicans brothers on every important issue. He lost his seat last year because Democrats refused to vote for him again. He just got fired from the job he took after that and decided he might as well run again. Kara is running on a progressive-populist platform. "People in districts like the Nebraska's 2nd," she told us, "are not interested in hearing what candidates are running against. They want and deserve to hear who candidates are, what they have accomplished and what they will do for their constituents."

Sam Jammal is taking on Ed Royce-- if he can get by the 4 self-funding multimillionaires running as Democrats in his Orange County district. "Trump," he told us, "is on the top of everyone's mind-- he is dangerous and impossible to ignore. But what he does is create an opening for voters to look at their options. We still need to give voters a reason to hire us. The voter's decision won't solely be about firing the incumbent-- most of them are too entrenched to just be fired because of Trump. We need to be careful to look at the election as a hiring-- not firing decision. Trump creates the environment for change, but won't drive it without quality candidates and a message that resonates." The DCCC prefers someone else-- Gil Cisneros, an ex-potato chip taster for Frito-Lay's who won $266 million in the lottery and is spreading it around among Democrats who agree to endorse him. Cisneros lives in a $10 million beachfront mansion in another district-- CA-39 has no beachfronts-- and has shown himself to know absolutely nothing about any of the issues people care about. And, of course, he's another "ex"-Republican the DCCC always gravitates to.

Patrick Hope is a Virginia state legislator and he is more in agreement with Wade than anyone else I spoke with. He reminded us that "Democrats across the country should take notice of what happened last week in Virginia. Voters are angry about the hateful and divisive policies coming out of the Trump White House and they are directing that anger squarely at Republicans. Many Virginia Republicans tried unsuccessfully to separate themselves from the failed promises of Trump or the divisiveness of Washington but they couldn’t escape the comparison. They could run but they couldn’t hide from the fact that Trump is the Republican Party. This will be even more pronounced in the 2018 mid-terms and is the secret formula to a Democratic victory and their retaking of the House of Representatives."

I also spoke with Andy Millard, a North Carolina Democrat who ran for Congress in a red district and didn't win. He watched that same Saturday Night Live skit last night and mentioned that all the Democrats in it "looked tired and old. The Nancy Pelosi character slowly intones, 'We won because you love our fresh, new ideas delivered by fresh, new faces.' The irony was what made it funny. I agree that candidates should pin Trump to incumbent Republicans, but I think we’ll need a lot more to win back the House. We have to demonstrate that we can lead in a new direction. Trump’s win should have shown us that Americans want something different, so much so that some are willing to roll the dice to get it. We’re not going to win by getting the band back together. I’ve met some great candidates as I plan the conference, and each one has to create their own positive brand and message independent of the national figureheads. I think that’s what it’s going to take."

Brad Miller was the last great Member of Congress from North Carolina. The Republican legislature used partisan gerrymandering to erase his district. This morning he told us that "Most of establishment-wing Democrats argue that all we have to do in 2018 is ride the wave of revulsion for Trump because that’s all they want to do. They think the pre-Trump status quo was perfectly satisfactory, and Trump voters already regret their vote. The permanent Democratic establishment thinks they'll just restore that status quo if a suitable Democratic is elected president in 2020 and everything will be fine. They graciously will not demand a formal apology from the American people for how ungrateful and disrespectful we have been to them." And Brad was just getting started:

Democrats may in fact not have to do much more than not have "R” by their name to do well in 2018. But if Democrats are just the party of the old status quo, then things might not go well for Democrats after that. And the battle lines of American politics will remain the same: two tribal parties that are both okay with corrupt oligarchy but fight the latest culture war in every election.

I don’t want to minimize the real harm that Trump and his appointees are doing, but it would be much worse if he were even minimally competent. We might face a version of Trump who is not a petulant, clownish dumbass, and that is truly scary. Pence could be a plausible celebrity spokesman for a Trumpist Republican Party and government as early as 2020, and maybe even before. A Democratic Party that promises just to restore the status quo of the last generation might struggle against that.

This whole debate reminds me of the discussions I read on North Carolina basketball fan websites. Should we go with our traditional lineup of big men in the paint, or with a smaller but quicker lineup? In basketball, I want to go with what wins, and I’ll leave that decision to our coach. I see no intrinsic virtue of a lineup with two bigs, two wings and a point if something else works better. Just win. Don’t cheat, play within the rules, but win.

I think Democrats can win in 2018 and beyond as the party of economic reform, but that’s not why I’m for those policies. I support structural economic reform because that’s what I think the country needs. Badly. Our economy needs to be dewormed. I want someone to attack the injustice and dysfunction in our economy, and the corrupting concentration of economic and political power, and Democrats still seem like the best bet. Yes, I think Democrats will be rewarded by voters if they do, but I want that for it’s own sake.

Our candidates might not have to wring their hands over how to seem “authentic” if they actually believed what they said and acted on their beliefs in office. Why do voters think so many candidates are empty careerists? Because so many are.

I want to close this out with comments from two of the savviest political leaders I know, California activist Norman Solomon and former-- and future-- Florida Congressman Alan Grayson. Alan was as succinct as Norman was thorough. He told us that "Donald Trump’s old reality show was called The Apprentice.  His 2018 reality show will be called The Biggest Loser." Norman went on for some length-- but important stuff:

Overall, this kind of approach-- prioritizing a quest for supposedly “persuadable” suburban GOP voters-- has proven to be a failure. That’s a big reason why Trump got elected. We should not forget that Chuck Schumer was expressing the conventional Democratic Party wisdom when he said in July 2016: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

As the Autopsy points out, “Schumer’s boast demands scrutiny not just because of the disastrous results in three of those four states, but because of the people it overlooked. It illustrated a fundamental assumption underpinning Democratic voter outreach: that to defeat Trump, the party could depend on white suburban voters and give short shrift to working-class voters-- including the voters of color who form 46 percent of the party’s base. This badly flawed assumption went much deeper than an offhand remark by a leading Democrat. The Democratic spending in the 2016 election focused enormous resources on white voters to the relative neglect of people of color.”

That neglect had devastating effects. The drop-off in votes for the Democratic ticket among people of color included a 5 percent plunge among Latino voters for Clinton compared to Obama’s total four years earlier-- despite the fact that Clinton was running against a virulently anti-Latino candidate who labeled Mexican immigrants “rapists” and all the rest of it.

Yet the repetition compulsion of largely targeting white “moderate” suburban voters still festers at the top of the Democratic Party. It fits in neatly with the persistent illusion-- fondly and disastrously embraced in 2016-- that Trump will defeat himself and Democrats need to mainly help him do that by continually hammering on how horrendous he is.

But that’s not how you get a very big turnout from the Democratic Party base-- and a very big turnout from that base is absolutely crucial if we’re going to take back Congress and then the White House. As Jim Hightower put it a few days ago, "Voter turnout is based on voter turn-on-- so, rather than stale robo-calls, let's give to working class people of different backgrounds a slate of progressive candidates and proposals that make them want to elect Democrats."

A lot more than just tactical differences is going on here. There’s a vision for the future behind many of the claims that the next election must be almost all about Trump and that white suburban voters hold the key. That vision, consciously or not, sees a de facto division of roles: wherein the Democratic Party’s base delivers a requisite number of votes while the party largely focuses its actual policies and outreach spending priorities on “moderate” white voters. And that vision looks forward to the corporate donor class retaining its hold on the party, while the base gets minimal attention with election outreach and minimal help from Democrats in power.

As the Autopsy concludes: “Operating from a place of defensiveness and denial will not turn the party around. Neither will status quo methodology... What must now take place includes honest self-reflection and confronting a hard truth: that many view the party as often in service to a rapacious oligarchy and increasingly out of touch with people in its own base… The party must learn how to speak a populist tongue that is in sync with real advocacy for a clear agenda, putting public needs above corporate profits. An imperative is to find common political denominators that are inspirational and practical, cutting across demographic lines while building foundations for social advancement and a humane future.”

Trust Bustin'

Kaniela Ing is the most progressive member of the Hawaii state legislature and Blue America and other progressive groups are trying to persuade him to run for the open congressional seat in Honolulu. If you wonder why, consider this statement he gave us today on anti-trust efforts: "In today's political climate, no entrepreneur looking to grow his or her business should ever consider voting Republican. The GOP's pro-oligarchy agenda has rigged the American economy against both workers and the majority of business owners. A handful of multi-national corporation and Wall Street investment firms are seeing enormous gains, while everyday entrepreneurs are being hung out to dry. Now that the GOP controls Congress and the White House, it's no wonder so many corporations are driving up prices, lowering wages, and shipping jobs overseas. The greatest threat to American innovation, small business, and a resilient economy is the monopolization of industries. Democrats must lead the fight to break apart monopolies and big banks, and build a future economy that leaves no one behind."

  The other day, in the post about the undrained, fetid Trump Swamp, we included two lists of the worst Wall Street bribe takers in Congress. Although Ryan led the House list with $10,955,550 and McCain led the Senate list with $39,398,887, the Democrats who were taking the most in Wall Street bribes were virtually all influential party leaders. McCain was at the top of the list primarily because he ran for president. Exclude him and the biggest crook in Wall Street bribe congressional history-- excluding presidential candidates-- is Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer ($26,628,675), who gobbled up more than the Senate's two top Republicans-- McConnell ($12,149,201) and Cornyn ($8,649,666)-- combined! The top 5 crooks in the House were all Republicans but the 4 of the 5 Democratic crooks run the congressional party:

• Joe Crowley, the heir apparent- $6,491,559
• Steny Hoyer, the Whip- $6,094,848
• Jim Himes, head of the New Dems- $5,773,452
• Nancy Pelosi, top dog- $3,650,387

To understand how internal party power is won and maintained, you have to understand the money flows from the banksters to the corrupt politicians, who lead each of the political parties. For example, it's important to understand the depth of Democratic Party corruption to fully understand the import of Danny Vinik's story about the new monopoly-busting.

Anti-trust crusader Barry Lynn and his operation, Open Markets, "has spent six years arguing that the Democrats have become too comfortable with corporate money and power, and need to rally around a new principle: breaking up monopolies. As the party remains locked in a struggle to reboot itself, unable to craft a unifying vision in the Trump era, Lynn and his group are trying to push it into a new fight against global corporate titans, targeting big companies like Google by name, and arguing that it’s time to use federal antitrust law to chip away at their influence. They see the fight as both a boon to democracy and a political framework that could excite voters in a new, more energized populist moment."

The problem, of course, is that Google and other tech giants-- and their multimillionaire executives-- are underwriting the Democratic Party and the careers of many of its leaders. Last cycle alone, computer software companies, for example, gave $10,438,708 to candidates for Congress-- $6,970,066 to Democrats and $3,354,067. Electronics manufacturing and equipment (which includes companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Cisco Systems, Apple, Intel, IBM. Hewlett-Packard and other tech giants) contributed $26,349,245-- $16,837,279 to Democrats and $9,292,413 to Republicans. Among the biggest winners in the House were party leaders who did not have contests races but who always appreciate the help with building their power:

• Paul Ryan (R-WI), Speaker- $236,065
• Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Majority Leader- $153,550
• Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Minority Leader- $91,187
• Steny Hoyer (D-MD)- Minority Whip- $75,400

In 2016, Google's company PAC spent $2,178,015 on candidates, although more on Republicans than on Democrats. Candidates they maxed out to ($10,000 each) included committee chairmen and party leaders like Ryan (R), McCarthy (R), Pelosi (D), Hoyer (D), Jim Clyburn (D), Steve Scalise (R) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R). And they gave $30,000 each to the DCCC, the DSCC, the NRCC and the NRSC, as well as $10,000 pops to the corrupt leadership PAC run by criminal elements like Wasserman Schultz, the Blue Dog PAC, the New Dem PAC, Hoyer's PAC and so on.

Lynn, a former journalist, has spent years building a public case that corporate monopoly is a growing threat, hiring like-minded thinkers and writers to advance the cause. The rest of his team has become increasingly high-profile, including Lina Khan, who earlier this year wrote an influential law-journal article attacking Amazon as the new shape of anticompetitive corporate behavior; Matt Stoller, a prolific Twitter warrior who communicates weekly with lawmakers like Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley-based congressman. Zephyr Teachout, the New York law professor and darling of the progressive left, will chair the board of the Open Markets Institute.

Open war with a powerhouse like Google, risky as it sounds, is typical of Lynn’s team, which is making a name for itself going after the largest possible targets in the Democratic universe. Khan’s article spent 40,000 words targeting one of the biggest names in the Democrat-friendly tech industry. Stoller, who frequently trades barbs with leaders of the Democratic establishment, is known for frequent attacks on Barack Obama himself, who he has called a “bad president” who is “ideologically averse to democracy” and whose policies “entrenched fraud and monopoly as the guiding principles in our commercial system.” At a time when Obama might be the only figure with some unifying power among Democrats, that amounts to something of a frontal attack on the very identity of the national party.

“[Barry has] been fearless and persistent in pushing these issues,” said Jonathan Kanter, an antitrust lawyer at Paul Weiss. “It’s hard to think of somebody more central to the discussion than Barry and Open Markets.”

Lynn and his team argue that the concentration of money and power in a small number of companies is a huge danger to our economy and politics, and that Washington's main weapon to combat it, antitrust law, has become rusty from lack of use. They want to revive the New Deal antitrust regime that prioritized competition and worried about the political power of large companies—a reform that would represent a reboot of antitrust thinking for the new tech age and the kind of new political rallying point that Democrats have been looking for.

Politically, it's novel territory: A populist philosophy that rejects both the technocratic approach of the Obama and Clinton administrations and the centralization at the heart of Bernie Sanders-style democratic socialism. Lynn and his team see themselves as essentially pro-competition and pro-business, creating new openings for smaller companies being boxed out by giants. At a time when the new Bernie-bro energy seems to be pulling the party toward its left fringe, they see this philosophy as offering a middle way, a populist agenda that can bring in independent-- maybe even Republican-- voters, appealing to a farmer in Des Moines, a small businessman in Dallas and a single mother in Detroit.

...[F]or all the Democratic Party’s renewed interest in antitrust, it has still not adopted the more ambitious and controversial aspects of Open Markets’ broader political philosophy. Notably, none of the new plans target Amazon, Google, Facebook or the other big tech firms that Open Markets believes are becoming the biggest threats to commercial freedom-- but are big political allies of the Democrats.

...In theory, Washington had a tool to deal with this problem in the form of antitrust law, which was once used to break up immense monopolies like Standard Oil. But in practice, that no longer happened. In 2006, in a much-discussed article for Harper’s, he called for the break-up of Walmart, saying that the retail giant had too much power over its suppliers and workers. That eventually turned into his second book, Cornered, which came out in 2010 and traces the rise of modern-day antitrust policy. Since the New Deal, policymakers had looked skeptically on large firms, preventing mergers that would create huge corporations and breaking up companies that grew too big. But in 1978, the conservative legal scholar Robert Bork published “The Antitrust Paradox,” a nearly 500-page book that argued that antitrust policy should be concerned only with “consumer welfare,” generally measured by consumer prices, and should not concern itself with the structure of markets. If prices were low, he argued, the market was working. Bork’s consumer-focused approach gained the support of prominent liberal economists like John Kenneth Galbraith, and under President Ronald Reagan it became national policy. The "consumer welfare" framework has driven antitrust policy under both Democratic and Republican administrations ever since.

Lynn argued that this approach was far too narrow and that it left the government powerless to fight some of the most damaging effects of corporate concentration. A monopolist can keep prices down and still cause harm-- by underpaying workers, for example, or influencing the political system. Lynn considers himself a deep believer in free market competition, a difference between the new antitrust movement and leftists, but he believes the government needs to play an active role in keeping those markets competitive. This philosophy dates back to the country’s founding, when Thomas Jefferson and James Madison argued that the government must protect individual citizens from monopolies; it was later reinvigorated by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. (For that reason, the new antitrust movement is sometimes called the “New Brandeis” movement; Stoller prefers Jeffersonian Democrats.)

If that sounds grandly historical, Lynn has never been shy about the import of what he's doing. “We are resurrecting a lost language of political economics,” said Lynn. “The word 'political' has been lopped off from the word economics. We’ve been taught to see economics as an entirely technical sphere. We have these experts who study problems, like doctors studying a body, and they tell us what to do. The traditional political economics is all about the engineering of power.” In this view, the shape of markets is inherently a political decision, but for decades it has been depoliticized under the guise of economics. “When the technocrats tell you it’s science, that’s bunk.”

“It is the extension of checks and balances into the political economy,” he added. “Competition policy determines how individual citizens compete with one another. It is the way that we make our society. It touches on absolutely everything.”

The Open Markets view is that government should use its antitrust powers broadly, to structure industries to meet societal goals. That structure would look different depending on the industry; industries that mass manufacture goods-- chemicals, cars, metals, for instance-- should be allowed to vertically integrate as long as they have real competitors, said Lynn. For farming, retail and services, antitrust would promote individual ownership, so that “people who want to be an independent farmer or insurance agent or restaurateur, if they had the wherewithal to do so, could run their business without facing giant, super-capitalized predators.”

In 2011, Lynn launched the Open Markets program at New America, an effort to take the ideas he developed in “Cornered” and bring them to a wider, more influential audience. Lynn’s first hire, Lina Khan, spent significant time out West, interviewing farmers and telling stories about their run-ins with the big meatpackers, like Tyson and Perdue. But more recently, Open Markets has become especially focused on the tech industry. The Silicon Valley behemoths, in this view, pose something of an existential threat not just to the economy but to democracy itself. “We see these institutions as incredible, powerful and very useful,” said Stoller, “but as concentrations of power that are dangerous.”

The argument runs like this: By exerting such near-total dominance of their own channels-- Google in search, Amazon in e-commerce, Facebook in social sharing-- the tech firms have become 21st century informational gatekeepers, controlling unprecedented quantities of data and building giant-- if unseen-- entry barriers that make it impossible for anyone to challenge them. But because these dangers are posed by companies offering consumers totally free services, or very low prices, they fly under the radar of current antitrust policy.

...Over the past two years, Open Markets’ influence has grown quickly: The Obama administration warned last year about corporate concentration; Hillary Clinton issued a fact sheet calling for aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws; Democrats adopted an antitrust plank in their 2016 platform; and Democrats prioritized antitrust in their “Better Deal” agenda. Open Markets has been involved in all these plans.

Open Markets doesn’t operate like a typical Washington think tank, spitting out an endless supply of white papers and policy memos and jamming them into the hands of congressional aides. In fact, it publishes very few papers at all. Instead, it focuses on conducting original research and writing articles for mainstream publications (including Politico, where Khan argued for significant reforms to the FTC). “With a few exceptions, there’s no reason to write up a policy paper and then convince a journalist to mention it someplace,” Lynn said. “We can vertically integrate and do the writing ourselves.” The Washington Monthly, a left-leaning magazine founded in 1969, has become a frequent place to find work by Open Markets scholars; recent stories have focused on concentration in the airline and poultry industries and blamed monopolies for the decline in black-owned businesses and the rise in regional inequality.

Lynn has also proven adept at managing and developing outside relationships, building a movement that extends beyond Washington. Joe Maxwell, a former lieutenant governor of Missouri and executive director of the Organization for Competitive Markets, which focuses on antitrust and trade policy in the agricultural industry, first met Lynn a decade ago at the OCM’s annual convention. Antitrust looms large in the agricultural world, in which many industries are dominated by a couple of major companies. Lynn has worked hard at building relationships with farmers like Maxwell and, importantly, bringing them together to form a more powerful political force. “The central conduit was Barry Lynn,” said Maxwell. “We discovered that there were more and more of us who thought the same way.”

In early 2016, Lynn and a few colleagues had dinner with Senator Elizabeth Warren, who had read some stories by Open Markets scholars and wanted to learn more about rising corporate concentration and the new antitrust movement. Soon after, a Warren aide contacted Lynn to say that the Massachusetts senator wanted to give a speech on antitrust. That speech, held in June and sponsored by Open Markets, marked a pivotal moment for the antitrust movement. “I love markets,” Warren exclaimed to a packed room. “Strong, healthy markets are the key to a strong, healthy America.” She went on to refute the Bork framework on antitrust and lamented that “competition is dying.”

In a speech in October, Hillary Clinton delivered her own criticism of rising concentration and released a fact sheet on antitrust. Amid the numerous distractions in the presidential election, Clinton’s commitment to stronger antitrust enforcement went largely unnoticed. But to the Open Markets team the message was clear: Mainstream Democrats had finally awoken to the problems of rising corporate concentration. It had been nearly two decades since the earthquake struck Taiwan and launched Lynn’s interest in antitrust, but finally Washington was listening.

But as Open Markets has begun to name names and push the envelope on what kinds of companies should count as a monopoly, it has run into some of the most powerful groups in Washington. During the drafting of the antitrust plank of the Democratic platform, Lynn and his colleagues pushed for language that would have directly targeted major technology companies, such as Amazon, Facebook and Google. But each time they added that language to the platform, it would get removed; ultimately, it was dropped altogether. Likewise, the Democrats’ “Better Deal” agenda called out the airline, beer and eyeglasses industries-- but it doesn’t mention the tech industry.

Lynn is still thrilled with the platform and “Better Deal” agenda; that antitrust policy has become a top priority for the Democrats is clearly a big victory for him. But the refusal to target the big tech firms is the clearest signal that Democrats aren't ready to jettison the consumer welfare framework and haven’t yet totally bought into Open Markets’ philosophy.

“They’ve made a major step forward,” Lynn said. “[But] the difference is bigger than they realize.”

“We’ve seen that academic thinking can filter into policymaking. That’s what Bork did,” said Representative Khanna. “My hope is that Lina Khan’s work will reorient antitrust to a concern on jobs and communities and concentration of power and move away from an absolutism about consumer prices.”

To the new antitrust movement, the tech firms are something of a litmus test for the Democratic Party’s commitment to the Brandeis and Jeffersonian vision of antitrust policy. To Stoller and Lynn, Obama clearly failed that test. The Obama administration largely embraced the tech companies, with a revolving door to the industry: Numerous tech workers, especially from Google, temporarily joined the administration. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe left politics to become Uber’s top lobbyist, and now has a senior role at the private foundation of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. More broadly, Democrats draw on Silicon Valley both for money and expertise. If Democrats were really to target these firms-- by calling for utility-like regulation, for instance-- the political consequences could be severe.

Philosophically, it’s hard for the Democrats to let go of the centrist dream of the 1990s, one that Bill Clinton rode to such success—that good technocratic governance is perfectly compatible with staying friendly to big global corporations. That technocratic approach achieved a lot of good, Democrats argue, and blowing it up-- whether for the sake of principle, or to chase a new populist coalition-- is unnecessarily risky. And it may not be a turnkey solution to today’s economic problems and the party’s political issues. “Antitrust is a critical part of this,” said Neera Tanden, the former Obama adviser who now runs the Center for American Progress. “It’s not the only issue that progressives need to address.”

For Open Markets, this philosophy is not just about antitrust. It’s about structuring markets to promote competition. Stoller draws a direct line from the Bork revolution to the election of Donald Trump. Rising concentration, in this view, has led to a litany of economic and social ills, enabling corporations to amass huge amounts of power over working Americans and fostering a deep-seated anger at the political establishment. “The New Dealers were very worried about autocracy and financial autocracy,” he said. “They would’ve understood that Trump is a result of a society that has lost control of its ability to manage its commercial institutions.”

He added, “We’re trying to bring this tradition back."

Orlando Democrat Alan Grayson explained why he sees this kind of antitrust action as important in the current political climate: "The secret ingredient to capitalism is competition. Without competition, capitalism doesn’t work. Monopolies and oligopolies grow larger and larger, and wealth and power accumulate in a small number of small hands. That threatens democracy, and impels us toward a Soviet-style economy and polity." Even a Republican should be able to understand this and see the dangerous implications.

It wasn't that long ago that Congress had an effective and powerful spokesperson for economic populism from the state of North Carolina-- Brad Miller. As soon as the Republicans gained control of the state legislature and governor's mansion they set about to gerrymander Miller out of his seat-- which they did in 2012. We still harbor hopes that he'll get back into elective politics at some point. Anti-trust and monopoly issues are part of his bailiwick and we asked him to comment about the politics behind the effort. His response is very much worth reading:

This is now the fault line between the establishment and reform wings of the Democratic Party. Voters may not be antitrust policy wonks, but they get the problem with the concentration of power. Internet and cable providers are always high on the list of the most hated companies in America. It will not be hard to persuade voters that the problem there, the reason Americans have the crappiest and most expensive internet service in the developed world, is lack of competition. And that because economic power has become so concentrated, competition in many industries has been smothered in the crib. They know that the companies with monopoly economic power have way, way too much political power, and that they get screwed as a result.

This was a big issue in the behind-the-scenes jostling between the establishment and reform wings over the expected Clinton transition. Reformers were not going to accept nominees for antitrust policy spots on the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice who went to good schools and did well and then went to work for prestigious law firms, but thought we just needed to restore the economic status quo that we had before the financial crisis. We wanted people who had a credible commitment to bring back antitrust.

I polled in my own district the legislation to break up the big banks. I figured since I’d introduced it, I should probably figure out if voters liked it, although I had a pretty good idea. The two reasons I gave in the poll question for the bill was that we shouldn’t ever have to bail the big banks out again, and because they had too much power. It was wildly popular.

The problem in the poll and in politics generally is that people are pretty skeptical now of what politicians say. There was a pretty good-sized chunk of voters who liked the bill, but didn’t really believed I’d introduced it, or thought there was some catch. They certainly didn’t think it was something that really made me different from other Democrats.

Voters now think that whatever politicians say in public, something else happens when the doors close in Washington and the real decisions are made. And they’re right about that.

Tim Canova is a Florida law professor who has been fighting these kinds of battles against big money interests for many years. Now it's spilled into politics as he takes on one of the most craven ands corrupt protectors of corporate dominance: Debbie Wasserman Schultz. "Democrats have been far too complicit for far too long in the gutting of antitrust enforcement and the rise of monopolies and cartels that gouge consumers, exploit workers, and corrupt our political system," time told us this morning. "In addition to renewed antitrust enforcement to prevent mega mergers and break up huge concentrations of corporate power, we need to reform the board rooms of giant corporations as well. As long as corporate CEOs effectively handpick board members, the gains from their cartels will flow mainly to top management and the wealthiest shareholders. If publicly-traded corporations were required to include representatives of workers, environmentalists, and taxpayers on their boards, there would likely be more effective oversight of management, less systematic frauds on consumers, and less damage to the environment. None of these needed reforms are possible as long as we keep electing career politicians who are taking huge campaign contributions from big corporate interests. That's why we need campaign finance reform, publicly financed elections, free TV and cable airtime for federal candidates, and much higher progressive tax rates on the super-wealthy to prevent them from corrupting the political process with huge campaign contributions."

Oh, Mike Pence Is Much Much Worse Than Tim Kaine-- No Comparison! So?

It's an extraordinarily low bar but Kaine is better than Penzzzzzzzzz

Someone on Twitter was trying to promote the idea that putting Tim Kaine first in the line to presidential succession was not just less terrible than putting Mike Pence there but actually a good thing... and used as evidence a link showing that Pete Peterson's Fix the Debt operation-- whose ultimate goal is the destruction of Social Security and Medicare-- named Kaine a Fiscal Hero, along with other such well-respected and beloved political figures of the American center-right as John Boehner (R-OH), Jim Himes (New Dem-CT), Rob Portman (R-OH), Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ), Steny Hoyer (D-K Street), Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN), Dan Coats (R-IN), and Michael Bennet (D-CO). I had just cast the deciding vote on a committee discussing whether or not to endorse Bennet for re-election to his Colorado Senate seat-- another lesser-of-two-evils choice being forced on the voters. (Happy to report that, Bennet, easily the lesser evil, isn't being endorsed.)

Peterson's operation defines Fiscal heroes as having "distinguished themselves by taking fiscally responsible votes, pushing their party leaders to make debt a priority, leading bipartisan efforts to work through policy options to fix the debt, using their town hall meetings to engage and educate constituents, delivering floor speeches to raise awareness about the issue, advocating to keep tough choices on the table, and introducing legislation to improve the nation's fiscal position. These elected officials have recognized that we will need to take a comprehensive approach to address the core drivers of the debt, such as entitlement reform and tax reform, to put it on a downward path in the long-term and allow the economy to thrive. Given that there is much more to be done to confront the nation's debt challenges, it is important that the work of those who focus on these issues is recognized."

Here, for example is wealthy, spoiled young Patrick Murphy, right after he was elected to Congress pretending to be a Democrat-- who didn't make the grade then but will soon, no doubt, going on TV and when asked what he would cut, twice volunteering Social Security and Medicare:



You know, one of the things that's wrong with settling for lesser-of-two evils candidates all the time-- we discussed it at greater length yesterday-- is that it means we have the wrong people making countless behind the scenes decisions daily. Tim Kaine is a shitty VP choice, not nearly as terrible as Pence, obviously, but certainly one I would ever want to see ascending to the presidency. His reasonable defenders-- not the ones bragging about how he's great for Wall Street and knows how to cut Social Security and Medicare-- point out that Planned Parenthood and NARAL have endorsed him (although he's "personally" anti-Choice), the Sierra Club supports him because he opposed the Keystone XL Pipeline, the AFL-CIO has given him a 98% lifetime rating, and that he stood up to the tobacco lobby and the gun manufacturers lobby while he was governor of Virginia. In fact, Kaine has a "F" from the NRA. That's all good... and I want to share something former Congressman Brad Miller of North Carolina sent me today, which he already published at HuffPo. Remember, someone appoints all these decision-making bureaucrats:

These are words that I have never written-- or thought-- before and expect never to again: House Republicans are right.

On July 11, House Republicans issued a report on an investigation into the Department of Justice’s 2012 settlement with HSBC, the British megabank, for laundering $900 million for the Columbian and Mexican drug cartels and for regimes under international sanctions for nuclear proliferation, genocide and support for terrorism. The DOJ touted the $2 billion civil penalty as a “record,” but the penalty amounted to five weeks of profits for the bank taken from shareholder funds. There were no criminal charges.

Lanny Breuer, the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, and Eric Holder, the Attorney General, both argued that the DOJ could not bring criminal charges because convictions might jeopardize the bank and the stability of the world’s financial system. But then Holder said his statement had been “misconstrued.”

Holder said “there are a number of factors that we have to take into consideration....Innocent people can be impacted by a prosecution....But let me be very, very, very clear. Banks are not too big to jail.” The DOJ would bring criminal charges where there was enough evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

The congressional report concluded there was ample evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The decision not to pursue criminal charges was entirely because HSBC was “too big to jail.”

Executive branch cooperation in congressional investigations is seldom cheerful, but the DOJ flatly refused to produce any subpoenaed documents. The Department of Treasury grudgingly produced some documents redacted at DOJ’s request. The stated reason was that the withheld information pertained to “prosecutorial decisions.”

The courts have never precisely defined “executive privilege,” the protection of the confidentiality of some discussions about some decisions between some executive branch officials to encourage uninhibited debate. But this much is clear: there is no blanket protection for “prosecutorial deliberations.”

There is no government power more susceptible to dangerous abuse or more in need of constant independent scrutiny than the power to bring, or not to bring, criminal charges.

An aggressive Senate investigation exposed the Teapot Dome scandal almost a century ago. The Secretary of the Interior went to prison for taking bribes for no-bid petroleum leases on federal lands. The Senate also examined the Justice Department’s failure to investigate and prosecute the people involved.

The Supreme Court upheld the Senate’s authority to hold a subpoenaed witness in contempt for refusing to testify on the Justice Department’s conduct. The Court said the question whether the Justice Department’s “functions were being properly discharged or being neglected or misdirected...concerned a subject on which legislation could be had and would be materially aided by the information which the investigation was calculated to elicit.”

A decade ago the Bush Administration fired federal prosecutors who had brought prosecutions that hurt Republicans or failed to bring flimsy prosecutions that would hurt Democrats. Administration officials refused to comply with House subpoenas and the House went to court. The court rejected the Administration’s argument that the decision to fire prosecutors was entirely up to the President and none of Congress’s business. Congress had a “unique ability to address improper partisan influence in the prosecutorial process,” the court said, and “[n]o other institution will fill the vacuum if Congress is unable to investigate and respond to this evil.”

There is no evidence that DOJ’s decision to settle with HSBC was criminally corrupt or the product of improper partisan influence. Wall Street critics hotly dispute that criminal prosecution of HSBC executives would have threatened the financial system, but DOJ’s decision to settle was likely based on that concern, as Breuer and Holder first said. The obvious injustice is deeply offensive to most Americans.

Savvy Washington insiders avoid public debate with Wall Street critics, so some political functionary told Holder that he was off message.

House Republicans’ concern for the injustice of the settlement is patently insincere. House Republicans’ only motive is to embarrass the Obama Administration, not to side with Wall Street critics.

Certainly the investigation could inform legislation. Most obviously, any institution that seeks the special treatment that HSBC received should immediately be broken into small-enough-to-jail pieces. That is legislation House Republicans will never enact.

But political embarrassment punishes misconduct, including the misconduct of staying on a message that deviates from the unvarnished truth. Americans are entitled to know how the power they confer by their ballots is used. And Americans are entitled to know if some powerful financial institutions receive special treatment in the criminal justice system.

A great American political scientist, Woodrow Wilson, wrote in 1885 that the “proper duty of a representative body [is] to look diligently into every affair of government and to talk much about what it sees...The informing function of Congress is to be preferred even to its legislative function.”

If congressional oversight causes political functionaries to hesitate to tell presidential appointees to stay on messages that are varnished versions of the truth out of fear of embarrassment, then that would be a wholesome result.

Can you keep this tucked away in the back of your mind? Some day we will will prevail on Miller to jump back into electoral politics-- so far we've come up short-- and at that time, we'll need to fight really hard for him. There aren't many Democrats willing to advance this kind of embarrassing narrative about the kind of corruption that has no place in democratic governance. Meanwhile, though, please consider helping get Alan Grayson into the U.S. Senate instead of either of the 2 Wall Street lackeys, Patrick Murphy and Marco Rubio, opposing him.

Alan Grayson Introduces A Constitutional Amendment To End Gerrymandering

Isn't it time to end the anti-democratic practice of gerrymandering? No, it's actually past time-- way past time. In 2012, for example, 59,645,531 Americans (48.8%) voted for Democrats running for Congress and 58,228,253 (47.6%) voted for Republicans. In a mathematically perfect world, the Democrats would have 213 seats and the Republicans would have 207 seats. That would have been a reflection of the popular will. Instead, largely because of gerrymandered districts, the Republicans wound up with 234 seats and the Democrats only got 201.

Let's look at it from a different perspective. 2012 saw a presidential election and a senatorial election in Ohio statewide. Democrats Barack Obama and Sherrod Brown beat Republicans Mitt Romney and Josh Mandel. Across the state, Obama won 2,697,260 votes (50%) to Romney's 2,593,779 (48%) and Brown won 2,645,901 votes (50%) to Mandel's 2,371,230 (45%). In theory, at least half of Ohio's 16 House seats (8, perhaps 9) would have gone to Democrats. But because the Republican-controlled legislature drew the district lines-- with the guidance of a secret committee staffed by Republican operatives and controlled by John Boehner-- and which were then approved by a highly partisan Republican governor, only 4 Ohio seats went to Democrats and 12 went to Republicans. All are extremely safe for their incumbents.

Republicans took the opportunity to oust progressive Democrat Dennis Kucinich by drawing a strange-looking district that stretched along a think swathe of Lake Erie from Toledo to the west side of Cleveland and throwing him into a primary with long term Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur. Both Cleveland and Toledo are majority Democratic areas. Further south progressive Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy had represented Ohio's 15th congressional district, a very competitive swing district. Before gerrymandering, it included half of Franklin County, with a significant number of Democrats, along with two rural Republican counties. Her own immediate neighborhood was divided up so that people on her short street were now in three different congressional districts and, adding insult to injury, the boundary of the new majority Democratic 3rd CD went up to her property line, putting her a few feet outside the new Democratic district-- the old 15th-- and into a deep red 12th GOP hellhole. Yesterday we asked Mary Jo what this kind of gerrymandering does to public policy and the interests of actual Ohio families, rather than just to the careers of politicians and power-games of the parties.

"Voters in Ohio," she told us, "have little opportunity to vote for change. When Representatives Stivers and Tiberi vote to defund Planned Parenthood or eliminate Obamacare, or do favors for the big banks that underwrite their political campaigns, they do so with impunity, knowing that they chose the voters for their hugely Republican districts."

And Ohio is just one example of this kind of political chicanery. Virginia, Michigan, Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, Texas have all seen corrupt Republican state legislatures draw district maps to thwart the will of the voters and give control to their own party.

North Carolina's most promising political leader, Rep. Brad Miller, was gerrymandered out of a district by a sharp GOP legislature who saw what a powerful force he could become. This morning I asked him how gerrymandering has changed his state. "It has been a long time since the Republican Party in the South has been the party of Lincoln," he told me. "The modern Republican Party in the South was born of opposition to the civil rights movement."

The strategy of Republican redistricting in the South has been to segregate African-Americans into a few districts no matter how garbled the lines, and claim that federal law made them do it. Jim Crow districts hurt African-Americans and hurt race relations. There might be a handful more African-American politicians elected as a result, but in office they are in a permanent minority. I represented a district that was 29 percent African-American. On Sundays, I was as likely to be in an African-American church as my own church., and I showed up every time a local branch of the NAACP had a banquet.  Southern Republicans with bleached districts don’t care in the slightest about African-American concerns.

North Carolina is now a purple state in national politics, and the congressional seats should be roughly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans as they were before the last redistricting. Instead, there are ten Republican seats and three Democratic seats, and the state legislature is just as bad. I have some friends running in very uphill districts and I wish them the best, but they have no chance to put together the coalition that elected me.

Democrats have wrung their hands and whined about this-- and in some cases fought back with the same kind of ugly corrupt practices, particularly in Illinois and Maryland. Monday, Orlando-based Congressman Alan Grayson offered the first-ever constitutional amendment to end gerrymandering nationally, something he based on a fair-districts amendment recently passed-- overwhelmingly and across party lines-- by Florida voters for their own state constitution.

Kilroy noted that Ohio will be stuck with the current congressional map unless Grayson's bill or something like it is passed. "And you can bet your powerball winnings that the Ohio legislature won't fix their handiwork. It will take intervention like Alan's bill to do it."

Grayson's amendment draws on the Florida provisions in several ways. His proposal would prevent congressional districts from being "drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent" or to disadvantage "racial or language minorities," and would require districts to "consist of contiguous territory" and use "existing political and geographical boundaries" whenever possible.

Mark Pocan, the Wisconsin congressman with the most progressive voting record in the entire Congress understand why this is so very important. "I think the basic principles of our democracy lay out pretty clearly that voters should choose their elected officials and elected officials should not be in the business of choosing their voters. Unfortunately, it has become more and more common for those in power to set the rules and draw the lines for the next election. The only way forward to ensure fair and free elections is to have simple, nonpartisan rules for drawing congressional districts. I’ve seen firsthand in Wisconsin what happens when elected officials are allowed to weigh in on how political districts are drawn and the results lead to a government that does not necessarily reflect the people’s will. This is exactly why I believe this process should be entirely removed from the hands of elected officials."

And President Obama endorsed the idea that's behind Grayson's amendment at the State of the Union last night: "We have to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around." People applauded; let see how they vote-- if Ryan even ever allows it to come to a vote.

Virtually The Entire House Financial Services Committee Should Be Indicted For Bribery

For much of the year we've been talking about the corruption that, to a great extent, defines the New Dems in Congress and pointing specifically to the bad apples among them that managed to get onto the House Financial Services Committee, one of the principal conduits of bribery cash from the Wall Street banksters to Congress. Of the seven Democratic freshmen who were "lucky" enough to be rewarded with the plumb assignment-- Bill Foster (New Dem-IL), Dan Kildee (MI), Patrick Murphy (New Dem-FL), John Delaney (New Dem-MD), Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ), Joyce Beatty (OH) and Denny Heck(New Dem-WA)-- 5 are New Dems and a 6th, Beatty, has a long reputation for sleaze and corruption. Last year we tried pointing that out to Ohio primary voters-- but after she won, Hoyer, Israel and Crowley must have been drooling at the description: Joyce Beatty, the business community’s hand-picked political shill, just "finished" her $326,000 a year job with Ohio State University (A do-nothing giveaway position that OSU won’t even bother filling after her departure) to run for election in the newly created district. So how does one receive a job that pays $326,000 at a public university, and how can you get one? Well, in 2008 former state Representative and Minority Leader Joyce Beatty used her influence to lobby for a job at Ohio State and instantly almost quadrupled her salary from $75,971 to $320,000. Since Ohio calculates pension rates based on the top three highest salary years, Beatty's pension payment quickly ballooned to a starting payout of $211,200 annually. Her 18 year pension total will balloon to a whopping $4,771,008. BOOM! She must be extremely special to merit such a high rate of compensation in a state where most people struggle to make $25,000 annually without benefits.

I wonder what she did to get that position. Well, this wonderful "business Democrat" voted in favor of the biennial budget, which included an increase in tuition rates. Hey, somebody has to pay for her salary and pension, right? Why not drop it on the backs of Ohio’s youth? The budget specifically allowed Ohio State University to raise tuition 12.9 percent. Ca-ching! According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer "… the $320,000 salary and the timing of [the] job offered to outgoing State Rep. Joyce Beatty [has] people talking. The Columbus Democrat will become OSU's senior vice president for outreach and engagement in January, just after term limits force her out of the legislature."

She may be "business friendly," but at least she didn't join the New Dems. She's more of a lone wolf crook. The New York Times story about corruption endemic to the House Financial Services Committee, doesn't even mention the words "New Dems" but that group is at the heart of their story, which starts out castigating a crooked Republican, Andy Barr of Kentucky, who had no experience with the intricacies of Wall Street when he won the committee jackpot.

Now, half a year into his first term, he has emerged as a telling example of why the panel is sometimes called “the cash committee”-- a place, critics say, where there are big incentives for freshmen to do special favors for the industry.

Mr. Barr, 40, a first-time elected official, has raised nearly as much money this year from political action committees run by major banks, credit unions and insurance companies as longtime lawmakers like Speaker John A. Boehner and other party leaders.

The flood of financial industry cash-- $150,000 in political action committee donations to Mr. Barr in just six months-- is hardly an accident.

One afternoon in April, Mr. Barr hosted credit union lobbyists and executives in his House office just before a committee hearing, promising that he would help protect a federal tax break worth $500 million a year, the executives said. Last month, he introduced legislation to eliminate a new federal rule intended to prevent banks from issuing mortgages to customers who could not afford to repay the debt-- a measure pushed by bank lobbyists who had visited his office.

“People support him because they agree with him,” Catherine Gatewood, Mr. Barr’s spokeswoman, said after he declined requests for an interview.

But Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat who served on the Financial Services Committee until January, when he left Congress, said the intense focus on fund-raising by freshman lawmakers like Mr. Barr is a potent sign of the harmful way that money distorts priorities in Washington, for both Republicans and Democrats.

“Freshmen are pushed and pushed and pushed to raise money-- it’s how they are judged by the leadership and the political establishment in Washington,” said Mr. Miller, who added that he felt the same pressure when he joined the Financial Services Committee in 2003 as a freshman. “It’s only natural that it has got to be on your mind that a vote one way or other is going to affect the ability to raise money.”

After the elections in November, Democratic Party leaders gave a PowerPoint presentation urging their freshman members to spend as much as four hours a day making fund-raising calls while in Washington, and an additional hour of “strategic outreach” holding breakfasts or “meet and greets” with possible financial supporters. That adds up to more time than these first-term lawmakers were advised to spend on Congressional business.

Much of this reflects the political reality that freshmen like Mr. Barr, particularly those from districts in which neither party dominates, are considered vulnerable. And that explains why a seat on the Financial Services Committee is so coveted.

Political action committees-- set up by lobbying firms, unions, corporations and other groups trying to push their agenda in Congress-- have donated more money to Financial Services Committee members in the first six months of this year than to members of any other committee. The $9.4 million total is nearly $2 million more than the total for the Armed Services Committee, the only House panel with more members.

With so many lawmakers clamoring to be on the Financial Services Committee, it has grown to 61 members from 44 since 1980, forcing the installation of four tiered rows of seats in the Rayburn House Office Building-- with the first row of lawmakers on the floor, just in front of the tables used for witnesses.

The committee’s chairman, Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas, remains the top recipient of donations from industry PACs this year, taking in $282,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that tracks the influence of money in politics. But three Republican freshmen-- Mr. Barr and Representatives Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Ann Wagner of Missouri-- have raised more money from industry PACs than many longtime committee members like Representative Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican who served as the panel’s chairman until the end of last year.

The imbalance is apparent on the Democratic side as well. Each of the seven freshman Democrats on the committee has raised more industry PAC money so far this year than the committee’s top Democrat, Representative Maxine Waters of California, who has had a testy relationship with the industry.

These freshman Democrats joined this year with Republicans on the committee-- over the objection of Ms. Waters and the Obama administration-- to support measures advocated by Wall Street banks that would roll back some of the strictest provisions of the landmark Dodd-Frank financial regulations, which were passed in 2010 in the aftermath of the global recession.

A spokeswoman for Representative Patrick Murphy, a Florida Democrat who has taken in more industry PAC money than any other Democratic freshman, $53,500, said his votes had been cast based on what he believed was in the best interest of his constituents, not to please potential contributors. But she agreed that the pressure to raise money was intense.

“The system is what the system is,” said Tiffany Muller, Mr. Murphy’s deputy chief of staff, adding that her boss supported changing campaign finance rules.

Mr. Barr’s industry outreach started even before he was sworn in to office-- at a “debt retirement” luncheon at Charlie Palmer Steak, two blocks from the Capitol, that he co-sponsored with a lobbyist who represents companies like Bank of America and MasterCard International. Tens of thousands of dollars came in to help Mr. Barr eliminate his campaign debt, including large checks from the American Bankers Association and PNC Bank, among others.

In one closed meeting with credit union executives in April, which took place after the PAC for the national credit union trade association donated $5,000, Mr. Barr promised to help defend the special tax-exempt status enjoyed by credit unions and fight new regulations.

Mr. Barr, in the five minutes he was allotted to speak during the April committee hearing, asked a series of friendly questions of an industry representative and made comments that echoed the points the credit union executives had raised. “The regulatory burden is very challenging for credit unions today,” Mr. Barr said, and then asked the credit union executives to describe what it was like before Dodd-Frank.

The credit union group gave Mr. Barr an additional $5,000 contribution two months after the hearing.

Mr. Barr has introduced separate legislation that would permanently exempt banks that keep mortgages in their own portfolio from a requirement in Dodd-Frank that they follow a prescribed set of steps to ensure that customers can afford the loans. Mr. Barr’s proposal, introduced with no co-sponsors, moved with extraordinary speed through the legislative process. Within two weeks, Mr. Barr boasted, it was wrapped into a larger House bill that was passed by the entire Financial Services Committee, a coup for a House freshman.

Ms. Gatewood, Mr. Barr’s spokeswoman, said his proposals were intended to make sure that Kentucky businesses and residents had sufficient access to credit, which has been harder to come by since Congress passed the new regulations.

Mr. Barr is hardly the only freshman to introduce bills that would benefit the industry. Ms. Wagner of Missouri, another Republican freshman on the committee who has pulled in a large number of industry contributions, sponsored a bill that would block or delay Labor Department rules intended to prevent life insurance agents and other brokers from selling financial products that they know may not be in the client’s best interest.

Consumer groups like AARP have joined with groups representing investment advisers-- who are already required to meet this so-called fiduciary standard-- to protest the legislation, saying the bill Ms. Wagner introduced is an unnecessary gift to the industry. “If you want to carry industry water, carry industry’s water,” said Barbara Roper, director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America. “But don’t pretend you are doing it to protect investors.”

A spokesman for Ms. Wagner said her legislation would ensure that consumers had access to a range of financial services.

One industry lobbyist, who asked not to be named because client matters are supposed to be confidential, said his political action committee was sizing up all of the Financial Services Committee freshmen as it tried to determine who could best help deliver on the industry’s agenda.

“It is almost like investing in a first-round draft pick for the N.B.A. or N.F.L.,” the lobbyist said. “There is potential there. So we make an investment, and we are hopeful that investment produces a return.”

Conservative and/or corrupt House Democrats on the Agriculture Committee and the Financial Services Committee are voting with Republicans to gut Dodd-Frank. In March, writing about what a corporate shill Ann Kuster had twisted herself into, I mentioned that the derivatives vote she backed "is an especially bad idea-- one that crosses a bright red line. Former Goldman Sachs banker Jim Himes (R-CT) is working with Republicans to pass it and Kuster was one of the Democrats who went along. She's touting her connivance with corrupt New Dem Patrick Murphy, an opportunist and lifelong Republican who switched parties to run for Congress, on a phony-baloney bipartisan caucus (which includes mostly extreme right-wing Republican sociopaths like domestic terrorist Steve Stockman) and she told a New Hampshire audience recently that 'On social issues, I am what they call progressive. But on the rest of the issues, I’m business-oriented.' So a Republican on economic justice?"

And doing the same thing on House Financial Services is another phony "liberal," careerist Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ).

At a House Financial Services Committee meeting, Arizona freshman Kyrsten Sinema, who's racked up one of the most reactionary voting records of any Democrat in Congress, might have thought no one was looking when she sold out her own constituents in favor of Wall Street banksters. She backed all the GOP's deregulation proposals and then touted it in the Democratic caucus. She wasn't who I was talking about here... but she certainly could have been.

...Don't expect heroism from the Kyrsten Sinemas of the word. Careerism... sure, but not heroism or anything remotely resembling courageousness. Steve Israel dictates her votes; he told the "Frontline Democrats" how to vote and there are only 7 of them who have followed his orders "100% of the time," to quote one of them feeble enough to send me a note about it defending a crap record. These are the 7 freshmen with 40% ProgressivePunch scores (same as right-wing sociopath Paul Broun (R-Pit of Hell)-- who have voted as a block 60% of the time against progressive positions on crucial roll calls:

• Dan Maffei (New Dem-NY)
• Bill Foster (New Dem- IL)
• Cheri Bustos (IL)
• Ann Kuster (NH)
• Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY)
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)
• Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ)

Yes, all of these men belong in prison, not in Congress

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