Last Night Even Conservative DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos Gave Up Trying To Sabotage An Impeachment Inquiry. And Even 30 Republicans "Would Like To" Impeach Him

Technically, the call for an official impeachment inquiry into Trump's treason is bipartisan, since ex-Republican Jason Amash (I-MI) is adamantly in favor of it. There are still no actual Republican members of Congress on board-- something that will likely hurt the reelection chances of Republicans Brian Fitzpatrick (PA), John Katko (NY), Fred Upton (MI), Chris Smith (NJ), Brian Mast (FL), Lee Zeldin (NY), Rodney Davis (IL), Michael McCaul (TX), Donald Bacon (NE), Elise Stefanik (NY), Peter King (NY), Scott Perry (PA), Vern Buchanan (FL), Steve Chabot (OH), Mario Diaz-Balart (FL), George Holding (NC), Tim Walberg, Chip Roy (TX), Peter Stauber (MN)... This morning, though, the Associated Press reported that Vermont Governor Phil Scott became the first Republican governor to back an impeachment inquiry. At a press conference today he said he wasn’t surprised by the allegations and said it is Congress' "solemn responsibility" to uphold the Constitution.

So far all the House Republicans and even vulnerable Senate Republicans, are holding firm: "Trump is being framed" or something like that. But if even the most timid of Democrats, Andy Kim of New Jersey, and Colin Allred of Texas are coming out for impeachment, there may be Republicans already doing the plus/minus calculations in their heads. But not Lindsey Graham! Boston Globe reporter Liz Goodwin asked Lindsey, South Carolina senator and Trump defender-to-the-death, to describe what he thinks would be "an inappropriate quid pro quo scenario." Lindsey lisped dramatically in that way southern closet cases always do: "Uh, hey pal, you know, you need to like, go after the Bidens or I ain’t gonna give you any money." He insisted Trump had to be "really like, thuggish about it."

Since my list of Democrats opposing impeachment yesterday, these have all changed their positions and now back a formal impeachment inquiry, many of whom were just waiting for the OK from Pelosi:

• Albio Sires (D-NJ)
• Kathy Castor (D-FL)
• Antonio Delgado (D-NY)
• Darren Soto (New Dem-FL)
• Marc Veasey (New Dem-TX)
• Lizzie Fletcher (New Dem-TX)
• Charlie Crist (Blue Dog-FL)
• Rosa DeLauro (D-CT)
• John Larson (D-CT)
• Steny Hoyer (D-MD)
• Donald McEachin (New Dem-VA)
• Steven Horsford (New Dem-NV)
• Susie Lee (New Dem-NV)
• Andy Kim (D-NJ)
• Joseph Morelle (D-NY)
• Susan Davis (New Dem-CA)
• Lois Frankel (D-FL)
• Debbie Wasserman Schultz (New Dem-FL)
• Linda Sanchez (D-CA)
• Ami Bera (New Dem-NY)
• Cindy Axne (New Dem-IA)
• Jahana Hayes (D-CT)
• Joe Courtney (D-CT)
• Jerry McNerney (D-CA)
• Gregory Meeks (New Dem-NY)
• Elijah Cummings (D-MD)
• David Scott (Blue Dog-GA)
• Bobby Scott (D-VA)
• Jim Clyburn (D-SC)
• Dave Loebsack (D-IA)
• Jimmy Panetta (New Dem-CA)
• T.J. Cox (New Dem-CA)
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Ed Case (Blue Dog-HI)
• Richard Neal (D-MA)
• Mike Thompson (Blue Dog-CA)
• Raul Ruiz (New Dem-CA)
• Susan Wild (New Dem-PA)
• Donna Shalala (D-FL)
• Abby Finkenauer (D-IA
• Peter Visclosky (D-IN)
• Stephen Lynch (New Dem-MA)
• Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)

A few more members will keep announcing for impeachment today and tomorrow. Right now, these are the ones still not convinced-- a combination of political cowards and actual Trump enablers:

• Colin Allred (New Dem-TX)
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)
• Cheri Bustos (New Dem-IL)
• Joe Cunningham (Blue Dog-SC)
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
• Sharice Davids (New Dem-KS)
• Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI)
• Jared Golden (D-ME)
• Vicente González (Blue Dog-TX)
• Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK)
• Ron Kind (New Dem-WI)
• Conor Lamb (D-PA)
• Al Lawson (New Dem-FL)
• Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog-IL)
• Ben McAdams (Blue Dog-UT)
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)
• Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY)
• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)
• Terri Sewell (New Dem-AL)
• Xochitl Torres Small (Blue Dog-NM)
• Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Frederica Wilson (D-FL)

People who guessed Van Drew.. seem to be onto something

Meanwhile-- and seemingly unrelated-- it's worth noting that yesterday 11 Republicans voted with the Democrats to end the bogus national emergency that he declared in February as an excuse for stealing congressionally allocated money from the Pentagon to build his vanity wall. It passed 54-41 but will be vetoed by Trump. Below are the 11 Republicans who voted against Trump. You'll note super-endangered Colorado Republican Cory Gardner was not among them. He voted with Trump... again. I spoke with Gardner's most formidable opponent, Andrew Romanoff, who told me that "The real emergency here is that Cory Gardner-- like most of his GOP colleagues-- has done nothing to counter a corrupt and lawless president. A handful of Republicans have stood up to Donald Trump as he disregards the Constitution and diverts public funds to fulfill a political promise. Cory Gardner, who campaigned as a 'new kind of Republican,' has proven to be anything but." The other senatorial Cory had a few words for Gardner and Republican lapdogs like him:

• Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
• Roy Blunt (R-MO)
• Susan Collins (R-ME)
• Mike Lee (R-UT)
• Jerry Moran (R-KS)
• Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
• Rand Paul (R-KY)
• Rob Portman (R-OH)
• Mitt Romney (R-UT)
• Pat Toomey (R-PA)
• Roger Wicker (R-MS)

Not enough to impeach. But... Robert Costa of the Washington Post noted that "several" of the Senate's usual Trump enablers were stunned yesterday and questioned the White House’s judgment after it released a rough transcript of President Trump’s call with the Ukraine president that showed Trump offering the help of the U.S. attorney general to investigate Joe Biden. One Senate Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, said the transcript’s release was a 'huge mistake' that the GOP now has to confront, even as they argue that House Democrats are overreaching with their impeachment effort." He reported that one of the top Senate staffers, likely someone in Moscow Mitch's office was expecting yesterday's closed-door lunch to be "tense as Republicans react to the transcript and debate their next step."

Mitt Romney, no fan of Trump's-- ok, no one hates Trump's guts more than Romney-- said he finds the transcript "troubling in the extreme. It’s deeply troubling. Clearly what we’ve seen from the transcript itself is deeply troubling." He seemed to even encourage the impeachment inquiry: "There’s a process the House is pursuing. The Senate is also looking at the testimony of the whistleblower." Ben Sasse (NE), another anti-Trump Republican who generally keeps his mouth shut, "In general terms, American elections should be for Americans. And the idea that we would have foreign nation-states coming into the American electoral process, or the information surrounding an election, is really, really bad." Yes, really, really. A Republican strategist, Mike Murphy told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC that a Republican senator told him "if it was a secret vote, 30 Republican senators would vote to impeach Trump."

Approached by the media, Maine Republican Susan Collins was not budging from her comfort zone: "If there are articles of impeachment I would be a juror just as I was in the trial for President Clinton, and as a juror I think it’s inappropriate for me to reach conclusions about evidence or to comment on the proceedings in the House." Bernie was less reticent. This is the statement he sent out to his supporters yesterday:

Gregg Miller, Shane Harris and Karoun Demirjian reported the about the cherry on Trump's cake: Joseph Maguire, Trump's hand-picked Acting Director of National Intelligence "threatened to resign over concerns that the White House might attempt to force him to stonewall Congress when he testifies Thursday about an explosive whistleblower complaint about the president. The revelation reflects the extraordinary tensions between the White House and the nation’s highest-ranking intelligence official over a matter that has triggered impeachment proceedings against President Trump." He warned the White House that "he was not willing to withhold information from Congress."

Republicans don't care what Schiff has to say-- especially Senate Republicans. After all he's only the House Intelligence Committee Chair. Why should they care; they're senators and someone might pick them to be president or vice president someday! Here are ten of them telling reporters their take-- or something-- on the whistleblower thing:

Need I Remind You? Biden Is Less Horrible Than Trump

John Lewis developed cordial relationships with segregationists too— but, unlike Biden— he wasn’t working with them to stop school integration. Ever since Biden bragged to a roomful of wealthy donors how he worked with racist senators back in the day, the media has been asking what it was exactly he worked with them on. A couple of days ago the Washington Post’s Matt Viser and Annie Linskey wrote that Biden “was a freshman senator, the youngest member of the august body, when he reached out to an older colleague for help on one of his early legislative proposals: The courts were ordering racially segregated school districts to bus children to create more integrated classrooms, a practice Biden opposed and wanted to change.” The senator was notorious Mississippi racist James Eastland, who publicly referred to blacks as “an inferior race.” Another Biden-buddy was Herman Talmadge of Georgia, every bit as racist and bigoted as Eastland. Letters between these two and Biden show a type of relationship, “in which they were aligned on a legislative issue. Biden said at the time that he did not think that busing was the best way to integrate schools in Delaware and that systemic racism should be dealt with by investing in schools and improving housing policies (in other words, “separate but equal,” which had already been exposed as a racist tactic to keep blacks in their place).

Biden’s campaign late Thursday issued a statement saying that “the insinuation that Joe Biden shared the same views as Eastland on segregation is a lie.”

“Plain and simple. Joe Biden has dedicated his career to fighting for civil rights,” the statement said.

Except he hadn’t. Biden’s been lying— at least publicly— about his racist past since Obama picked him as a ticket-balancer for the 2008 election. Biden has been asking status quo conservatives in the Congressional Black Caucus to vouch for him. Some are. One of the Biden letters to Eastland says “My bill strikes at the heart of the injustice of court ordered busing. It prohibits the federal courts from disrupting our educational system in the name of the constitution where there is no evidence that the governmental officials intended to discriminate… I believe there is growing sentiment in the Congress to curb unnecessary busing."

Two years earlier the Senate had passed a Biden amendment that prohibited the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from ordering busing to achieve school integration. These were the years I discovered Biden and identified him as a political enemy, worse even than Joe Lieberman at the time. My opinion of him has been on a downward spiral ever since. Biden teamed up with segregationist senators and worked with them for years against integration. It’s hard to imagine that the deepest support Biden is getting now is from elderly African-American voters. I guess they either weren’t aware of Biden back then or have forgiven him— or think God really did create him out of one of Obama’s ribs.

Writing yesterday for The Atlantic centrist Edward-Isaac Dovere noted that Biden has always been looking for some kind of mythical centrist position on race and that newspaper archives are full of his efforts to explain his thinking on civil rights. Dovere is very sympathetic to Biden and The Atlantic should find another reporter to cover the candidate.

Biden thinks that’s his special insight into politics, that he’s a bridge builder— but it’s meant building bridges to people others think don’t deserve any kind of bridge. He seems to think that approach is especially useful over issues of race. There are archives full of comments, in newspaper accounts and videos, of Biden trying to explain his thinking on the matter. But given how much the conversation over race has changed in the past 50 years, that’s left him with a lot of remarks and relationships that can look out of sync in 2019, even as the 76-year-old former vice president says he’s still the same guy he always was. The comments reinforce a vulnerability— one his opponents have already jumped on.

The thread is there in his first big interview before his inaugural Senate run: “I have some friends on the far left, and they can justify to me the murder of a white deaf mute for a nickel by five colored guys. They say the black men had been oppressed and so on. But they can’t justify some Alabama farmers tar and feathering an old colored woman,” Biden said in November 1970, just as he was coming onto the political scene. He had just won his first election to the New Castle County Council, and he was featured in a major profile in the Wilmington, Delaware, News Journal with a splashy headline: “Joe Biden: Hope for Democratic Party in ’72?”

“I suspect the ACLU would leap to defend the five black guys,” Biden continued in the interview. “But no one would go down to help the ‘rednecks.’ They are both products of an environment. The truth is somewhere between the two poles. And rednecks are usually people with very real concerns, people who lack the education and skills to express themselves quietly and articulately.”

That was the thinking Biden seemed to be reflecting on Tuesday night at a New York City fundraiser when he recalled working with two of the most famous segregationists in the Senate. Pushing back on Democrats who’ve called for a take-no-prisoners approach to dealing with congressional Republicans, he noted that Senator James Eastland of Mississippi “never called me ‘boy’— he always called me ‘son.’” Henry Talmadge of Georgia, meanwhile, was “one of the meanest guys I ever knew,” Biden said.

“Well, guess what? At least there was some civility,” Biden added. “We got things done.”

Biden has reacted with frustration to the blowup, with most of his most prominent 2020 rivals, and a number of other prominent liberals, aghast that he could wistfully invoke names like Eastland, often known as “the voice of the white South.” That frustration has created another layer of issues: After Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey called on Biden to apologize, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, struggled to explain, in an appearance on CNN Friday morning, why Biden had said Booker should apologize to him instead.

Biden says he has nothing to apologize for and that his record speaks for itself. “I’ve been involved with civil rights my whole career—period, period, period,” Biden said on Wednesday evening, citing specifically his work extending the Voting Rights Act. That’s the defense from his campaign: His adviser Symone Sanders tweeted Wednesday afternoon that Biden “literally ran for office against an incumbent at 29 because of the civil rights movement.” Yesterday, she told me that Biden had run “because he disagreed with the segregationist senators in office at the time.” Biden didn’t seem to talk much about that particular motivation during his first Senate campaign, though a story the segregationist Senator John Stennis of Mississippi told late in life, which was recounted in a 2007 Delta Democrat-Times article, provides some backup. When Stennis asked Biden in 1973, according to the article, “‘Why did you get into politics?’ Biden looked him in the eye and said, ‘Civil rights.’”

Biden has struggled to explain himself on race and civil rights for decades, and for decades, liberals have been suspicious of those explanations— though perhaps never more so than now, with Biden campaigning on restoring the good ol’ days and many in his party arguing that those days weren’t as good as he remembers. (His campaign press secretary declined to comment on the candidate’s previous statements in his career.)

Once he arrived in the Senate in the early 1970s, Biden prioritized the fight against busing to integrate public schools, pushing for an amendment that he said would expose liberal doubts about the practice. In a Philadelphia Inquirer article in 1975, Biden said, “I think I’ve made it possible for liberals to come out of the closet.” When he was running for reelection in 1978, the Wilmington Morning News wrote that “the only substantive legislation bearing Biden’s name to reach the nation’s law books is the Biden-Eagleton Amendment, which has shut down efforts by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to achieve busing for school desegregation.”

Biden had placed himself firmly on one side of one of the fiercest fights about race of the 1970s (a position a spokesperson said in March he still stands by). He spoke often about how he did not believe in the theory behind busing—that there was a greater good achieved by that method of forcing integration. As he put it in a November 1976 speech, according to the News Journal, “black kids don’t want to come to your school any more than you want to go to their school.”

Biden argued that he was just pursuing common-sense solutions when he pushed back on liberals’ support for busing, along with racial quotas in schools. But he was making unsavory allies along the way. When he became chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1980— a position for which Eastland had backed him— Biden said he wouldn’t fight over busing with Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator and famous segregationist who’d become a friend. But, he told the News Journal in 1980, “if Strom Thurmond is serious about eliminating the Voting Rights Act, I’m going to fight it. I’ll be visible in that fight.”

News accounts at the time suggest that Biden was not integrally involved in crafting the reauthorization of the VRA. One referred to him as playing “second fiddle” in the process. But they do credit him with arranging a meeting between civil-rights activists and then– Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, in a move that helped get the bill passed and onto then-President Ronald Reagan’s desk.

Biden believes actions like these demonstrate his true character. He supported making Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday, calling the leader “the social conscience of this nation.” And he opposed Jeff Sessions’s 1986 nomination to a federal judgeship over his comments calling groups like the NAACP un-American.

Biden, like Trump an inveterate liar who can’t seem to tell the truth from self-serving stories about his history, painted himself a warrior for civil rights. He wasn’t. He always claimed he marched with Dr. Martin Luther King. He hadn’t. As far as I can tell, Biden was always a racist piece dog shit who would pretend when he had to that he was sympathetic to people he always worked against. Like Trump, when caught out in his lies, he just continued lying.

By September 1987, his campaign press secretary clarified to the New York Times that Biden “did participate in action to desegregate one restaurant and one movie theater.” Or as Biden once explained at a 1987 news conference, he’d been concerned about civil rights as a teenager, but he “was not out marching.” He’d “worked at an all-black swimming pool on the east side of Wilmington,” Biden said, and “was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of what was happening to black Americans.”

The middle is where and how Biden always thinks of himself. “I was never an activist,” Biden once said. “I didn’t march on Selma. Vietnam wasn’t a big issue in my college days. I was a middle-class kid in a sports coat.” Biden graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965, before the anti-war protests peaked. He enrolled in Syracuse University for law school, graduating in 1968, but he explained at the 1987 presser, using similar language, how he remained apart from what was happening in the streets. “By the time the war movement was at its peak ... I was married, I was in law school, I wore sports coats … I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dyed shirts. And you know, that’s not me,” he said.

Yet for all the talk about civil rights, Biden never lost his personal fondness for the segregationists he worked with in the Senate. A decade before he delivered his now famous eulogy at Thurmond’s funeral— in which he called the old Dixiecrat “a product of his time”— Biden spoke at the senator’s 90th birthday party in Washington, D.C., in March 1993. Standing in a tuxedo, Biden compared Thurmond to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee: “an opponent without hate, a friend without treachery, a statesman without pretense, a soldier without cruelty and a neighbor without hypocrisy.” He talked, too, about Stonewall Jackson. Quoting the Confederate soldier James Power Smith writing about the general he served under, Biden said, “He was an avalanche from an unexpected quarter, a thunderbolt from the sky, and yet he was in character and will, more like a stone wall than any man that I have ever met.

“That seems to me to sum up Strom Thurmond: He is like a thunderbolt from the sky,” Biden continued. “He is a man who lives by his principles and a man who has gotten all of us to understand what they are.”

Like Trump did when he got called out for one of his racist antics, Biden said, “There’s not a racist bone in my body.” Clueless from head to toe, Status Quo Joe then said Cory Booker should apologize.

I don’t think Trump-- an insensitive oaf-- cares one way or the other about race. He’s a team player and his team happens to be racist... so he’s playing the racist too. But down deep, I doubt he really gives a hoot. If someone is rich and can do him some good, that’s more important than skin color. Biden, on the other hand, has always been a filthy, stinking racist at his core and I sense he still is and will always be. Over all, is Biden better than Trump? Sure… but they both get “F” grades from me.

Can Rosario Dawson perform a 2nd Miracle on Cory Booker?

Cory Booker by Nancy Ohanian

-by Emorej

The 1st miracle of the 2016 Bernie-supporting (& Stein-voting) Rosario Dawson has been to enable Cory Booker to sound sincere, in saying:

"I’m very lucky to be in a relationship with someone who is just so incredibly special, but more importantly has taught me so much in a very short period of time… an incredible human being… She really has this nurturing spirit.”

A 2nd miracle would be for Rosario (39) to teach Booker (49) the following:

1. Booker’s entry into the 2020 Presidential campaign was exceptionally stupid.

2. Much worse than the widely recognized 2020 stupidity of Joe Biden, which is mitigated slightly by factors such as this being Biden’s last chance before being prevented by the aging of his body, mind, and image as Obama’s Vice President. In contrast, Booker can run any time in the next 25+ years, during which the Rosario-improved mature Booker might make us forget the [expletive deleted] immature Booker.

3. Why did Booker say it was “disgusting” for Obama’s 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney to “demonize private equity”? Because Booker’s entire life (until he launched his political career by invading a slum of Newark NJ) has been in the bubble of the Ivy League track, sharing experiences and acculturation with rich White peers-- many of whom, presumably, Booker enabled to feel ‘not racist because some of my best friends are… educated ‘hardworking’ Blacks like Cory.’ In contrast, Obama only got a foot in the Ivy League after a childhood among economically and culturally diverse communities, and didn’t get two feet in until law school.

4. 2020 nominee Booker would be the perfect foil for Trump to double down on his basic political strategy of seeking to combine:

(a) deep support from White racists, with
(b) shallower support from people enraged that Ivy League-flavored Wall Street-centered elites’ longstanding economic and political dominance is increasingly incompetent and deaf to voters’ demands for change.

5. Trump is also well-equipped to mock Booker (truthfully-- for a change) for:

(a) the suspiciousness of Booker getting along too well with the local political machines in New Jersey, where they are nearly the archetype of corruption (which Trump knows from his NJ casino experience), and
(b) the cowardice of Booker having ducked the opportunity to challenge then-popular Republican Governor Chris Christie in favor of preparing to primary an aging Democrat (imagine the dramatically overweight Christie’s speaking tour message “Stanford football player Cory is a wimp who was scared of me…”).

6. The only real questions about Booker 2020 are:

(a) when will he drop out, and
(b) which candidate will he endorse?

Rosario probably cannot persuade Booker to endorse Bernie, but it would be big news if she could persuade him to refrain from making the obvious favor-earning endorsement of Kamala Harris. This would be a huge slap in the face for Kamala’s message that ‘now is time for a second Black and first woman President.’

7. Booker’s youth gives him more to lose than most of the many people whose reputations will forever bear the stain of having participated in the 2020 anybody-but-Bernie conspiracy, which is going to be a very dirty marathon. Rosario probably knows this better than most of us, and she is the one person equipped to give Booker an easy escape and reboot opportunity. At the extreme, Booker could give up his Senate seat in order to stay at Rosario’s side during a few pregnancies and joint-parenting projects, which could make him into:

(a) a man who doesn’t just talk the talk of “love” (Booker’s favorite word), and
(b) an eventual Presidential candidate who had learned how to (like Bernie) wait for his moment, and hopefully to transcend his early opportunism, narcissism and stupidity.

Is It Too Late For Cory Booker? Or Too Early?

Cory Booker by Nancy Ohanian

I was never much of a Cory Booker fan. Before he decided to be progressive-- for whatever reason and for however long his commitment turns out to be-- he was an unabashed Wall Street whore, a charter school fanatic and a loony Zionist. (He may still be a loony Zionist.) But, you know what? He was elected to the Senate and-- with a couple of glaring exceptions (like his refusal to vote for Bernie's bill to allow pharmaceutical imports from Canada)-- he's run up an impressive voting record. Since being elected, his ProgressivePunch crucial vote score is a sterling 97.09%, the 4th best in the Senate.

So far, his campaign for the presidency hasn't made much of a splash. Polls usually find him trailing, badly, frontrunners, Biden, Bernie, Kamala and Beto, rarely getting even to 5%. But the media still treats him as a serious contender. Yesterday, Politico reporters Burgess Everett and Natasha Korecki, looked into his struggle to find himself in the context of the 2020 primary.

The party has moved left in terms of policy preferences and Booker-- like his colleagues Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand-- has mostly followed along, albeit tepidly. "At the end of January," wrote Everett and Korecki, "Cory Booker was emphatic in his defense of the filibuster. 'We should not be doing anything to mess' with it, he said. By springtime, the New Jersey Democrat had softened his stance considerably: 'That door is not closed.' As some of his 2020 competitors warm to dramatic reforms like eliminating the Senate’s 60-vote threshold and adding justices to the Supreme Court, the White House hopeful from Newark is plainly wrestling with whether to follow suit."

[Note: Bernie and Elizabeth Warren aren't followers; they're leaders. Status Quo Joe has always been on the side of holding back and opposing the will of the unwashed masses. The rest of the electeds in the race are somewhere in between. Booker? A natural centrist with the smarts to understand the grassroots of his part is populist and progressive.]

In an interview, Booker laid bare what he is grappling with: He’s been in the minority most of the time he’s been in the Senate and seen the power of the filibuster block the conservative agenda. And he’s worried that if Democrats make changes to the fabric of the Supreme Court, it will be exploited to potentially greater effect by Republicans in the future.

“You have to understand that a lot of these that are talked about: If we do it when we have the control to do it, they can do it again. What we need to find is real solutions that are sustainable regardless of who is president,” Booker said. “We should be careful about the traditions in this country and how we honor them.”

But his institutional loyalties are being tested by an activist base lurching left and a need to break out of the sprawling Democratic field where he registers in the low- to mid-single digits.

His ambivalence toward such explosive changes reflects Booker’s broader positioning in the 2020 race and within the Senate Democratic Caucus. The 49-year-old senator has a reliably liberal record, though he’s clearly to the right of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and has worked closely with some Republicans to advance his priorities.

It’s a profile that could ultimately help him stand out among his 2020 counterparts-- if his bipartisan leanings and campaign of “love” can connect with primary voters eager to take down President Donald Trump.

In just the latest example of the party’s rapid shift, Booker-- long a pro-Israel stalwart-- is attending the AIPAC conference in Washington this weekend but only to meet with New Jersey constituents. Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Sanders (I-VT) are staying away entirely.

And in an appearance with Pod Save America last week, Booker expressed new openness to killing the filibuster and admitted the progressive podcast fires “a lot of people up” on the kinds of process reforms once discussed only on the fringes. He’s also sounding increasingly open to changes to the Supreme Court, like imposing term limits on justices.

Yet in the interview with Politico, Booker deemed the tit-for-tat among Democrats and Republicans that eliminated the filibuster on all nominations over the past few years as a “race to the bottom.”

“Are we going to turn the United States Senate into a majoritarian body like the House? Because I think if that’s the case there would be regret among 100 senators, regardless of the party,” Booker said. “Is there a way to get back to creating a body that deals by comity and serves the American purpose?”

The party’s energy is clearly concentrated among younger, more progressive activists. But more than 60 percent of the Democratic electorate most likely to vote in primaries is 40 and older, a statistical reality that potentially benefits a candidate who is viewed as more in the middle and focused on pursuing bipartisanship.

Though Booker brandishes a progressive form of politics and is eager to seize the spotlight at committee hearings, he’s also developed surprisingly close relationships with conservative Republicans like Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Tim Scott of South Carolina. He often cites those friendships on the campaign trail as evidence that he is the candidate able to heal a divided nation.

At the same time, Booker says that Republicans are “clearly” playing by a different set of rules than Democrats. And he seemed particularly miffed that the “blue slip” tradition of allowing home state senators veto power over appellate court nominees has officially been abandoned by the GOP.

“That just creates a certain sense with the Democrats: When we are in power, we’re going to double down and do the same thing at least,” Booker said, deliberating as he spoke. “That doesn’t mean … that we should somehow not try to balance the scales.”

Liberal groups argue their party’s most ambitious proposals-- not to mention counterbalancing the Supreme Court seat stolen from Barack Obama-- are impossible under current Senate norms and rules.

Activists say Booker is listening to them, even as he refuses to embrace their strategies just yet. For instance, Booker argues a Democratic Senate majority could use budget reconciliation to repeal the GOP tax cuts without gutting the 60-vote threshold for legislation. People close to Booker say he’s unlikely to be the first to explicitly endorse killing the filibuster or expanding the Supreme Court.

His stances track neatly with a record that leans left, with an occasional tack toward the center.

He routinely votes against Trump’s nominees, endorses the “Green New Deal” and “Medicare for All” and said he’d risk expulsion in his fight against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

But he also took weeks before declaring his eventual support for Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, drew flak for opposing a measure aimed at importing drugs from Canada and made liberals squirm way back in the 2012 presidential campaign when he called attacks on Mitt Romney’s old firm Bain Capital “nauseating.”

In the previous Congress, Booker worked closely with Trump aide and son-in-law Jared Kushner to reform criminal justice laws, while teaming with Grassley and Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham to try and protect special counsel Robert Mueller from being fired by the president.

No one would call Booker a moderate, but in the spectrum of the Democratic primary he falls somewhere in the middle. Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), who plays basketball against the former Stanford tight end, described Booker and his politics this way: A “smart son of a B.”

Jim Demers, a Democratic strategist and longtime New Hampshire activist backing Booker, called the senator a “pragmatic progressive.”

“Voters are frustrated, and they’re frustrated because the country is so divided,” Demers said. “He’s walking a fine line of espousing positions that are very progressive but also recognizing that when this election is over, a president has to get things done.”

Simply by virtue of how many Democrats are in the primary, there’s also a decent chance that Booker falls short and remains a senator for decades. For that reason, his GOP colleagues say he’s unlikely to be the candidate trashing the Senate as a campaign tactic.

“He’s a positive person who looks for the best in situations. And he is critical when necessary. But not critical as a way of simply attracting folks to a conversation,” Scott, the Republican senator, said of Booker.

It’s also not clear whether process reforms resonate with voters, anyway.

“In Iowa, how many people are going to vote on your position on the Supreme Court? … It’s probably a mistake to overhype the power of some of those process litmus tests,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who is close friends with Booker. “Cory probably has a legitimate interest in trying to find a long term way for Republicans and Democrats to work together.”

There’s also some evidence that primary voters are leery of candidates who are moving too far to the left. In a recent Iowa poll where both Vice President Joe Biden and Sanders dominated the field, 44 percent of those surveyed said Sanders’ political views were too liberal. Meanwhile, 70 percent of the Iowa Democrats polled said Biden’s views were “about right.”

The same poll showed 42 percent believed Booker’s views were “just right,” with only 9 percent seeing him as “too liberal.”

“My sense is he is trying to distinguish himself,” said Brady Quirk-Garvan, former chairman of the Charleston County Democrats in South Carolina, who has endorsed Booker. “Booker is now saying: Here’s what is different and unique about me. Here’s what makes me uniquely qualified to be the nominee.”

How Flawed Is Too Flawed To Be An Effective Candidate?

I'm sure no one doubts that Trump and his allies have every intention in the world of causing as much chaos as they can-- and worse-- in the 2020 Democratic primaries. Writing for CNN yesterday, Jeff Zeleny and Kaitlan Collins reported that Trump is watching announcement rallies, tuning into televised town hall sessions with voters and listening carefully to commentary on the Democratic presidential race. His opinions fluctuate on who he will, or would like to, run against. But one sentiment is unwavering-- he has no plans to sit idly by and watch. [He] intends to play an active role in the Democratic primary and has instructed his aides to look for ways he can, according to more than a dozen Republicans involved in his campaign. His team is working to sow divisions among rivals and looking for opportunities to 'cause chaos from the left and right,' in the words of one adviser."

And despite the concerted effort by corporate media-- led, wittingly or not, by Rachel Maddow-- to white-wash Amy Klobuchar's transgressions, no one is giving Trump an easier target that the aggressively boring senior senator from Minnesota, whose claim to "Minnesota Nice is, at best, tenuous. No doubt Trump lapped up the noise, How Amy Klobuchar Treats Her Staff, by in the NY Times, yesterday. After interviewing dozens of Klobuchar staffers, Matt Flegenheimer and Sydney Ember wrote that "In private, she could deliver slashing remarks without particular provocation. Parched one day in the Capitol, she turned to a member of her team and said, 'I would trade three of you for a bottle of water,' according to a person who witnessed it." That's an example of what earlier in the month Maddow excused as her winning sense of humor. Had Bernie (or Trump) said it, Maddow would be accusing them of colluding with Russian aluminum barons.

Former aides said Klobuchar frequently told them they were damaging her political career. On one occasion, a former aide recalled, Klobuchar accused her of "ruining my marriage," too. (The aide said she interpreted the comment to mean that Klobuchar, in her telling, was forced to work overtime, away from family, to overcome the aide's failings.)

Many staff members did warmly recall the misery-loves-company camaraderie that built among aggrieved aides. But the core truth of life with Klobuchar was never going to change, they said: She thought she was demanding their best and getting far less. And she was never going to apologize for pointing that out.

"I need to do some serious soul searching about our office," she said in one e-mail, lamenting the team's work product. "How can you treat me like this time and time again?"

One of the top and most respected Capitol Hill staffers sent me this last night-- word for word: "Off the record-- I have a former colleague who worked for her and said the coverage isn’t fair... he says she’s far worse than what has been reported."

Moments later, a member of Congress, unsolicited, sent me a note asserting that "a staggering number of staffers on Capitol Hill are self-important shitheads who waste all their time gossiping and never do anything useful. It is FAR more difficult to get anything useful out of the staffers than it is other Members, even Republicans. And the way I have been playing it, there is a lot more at stake than who cleans the salad out of the comb." He did, however, go on to say that what was really sad about the article is that "Klobuchar’s main legislative 'accomplishment' is swimming pool safety. If someone could find me a candidate who had instituted universal healthcare, I wouldn’t care if he or she held some staffer upside down out the window by his ankles, and shook him until the change fell out of his pockets.

"The other day, I looked into how someone as deeply incompetent and stupid as Theresa May could ever have been elected the head of the Conservative Party. The answer is this:

• One opponent pointed out that she had children and May did not, which was reported endlessly in the media as a vicious low blow.
• Another opponent sexted a woman who was not his wife.
• Another opponent came out in favor of a third runway at Heathrow Airport, which somehow was twisted by the media into a callous disregard for the right to peace and quiet.

"The only thing that even remotely resembled debate of a serious issue is that May was the only candidate who said that she 'would negotiate' to kick three million legal EU emigrants out on their asses when Britain left the EU, while the others said they could stay.

"I’m sorry about the salad and the comb, but this already is descending into trivial bullshit. And Trump will exploit it-- mark my words."

No one's going to ever have a White House as chaotic, miserable, paranoid and dysfunctional as Trump. But that's way too low a bar to set for aspiring politicians eyeing the White House. Her staffers say she crosses the line between being a demanding boss and being a dehumanizing boss. She told her staff that their tweeting (in her name) makes her look like a joke and that she feared there was "an in-house mole." She rate-fucked staffers who left her employee when prospective employers asked for recommendations. She sounds like exactly I would have avoided hiring as a department head when I was president of Reprise Records. She was "the steward of a work environment colored by volatility, highhandedness and distrust." Staff turnover in her office "perennially ranks near the highest in the Senate." People like Klobuchar fail leadership tests and produce crap results-- always... no, not sometimes-- always; I don't care how much Rachel Maddow appreciates the deference the senator pays her.



"She was known to throw office objects in frustration," wrote Flegenheimer and Ember, "including binders and phones, in the direction of aides, they said. Low-level employees were asked to perform duties they described as demeaning, like washing her dishes or other cleaning-- a possible violation of Senate ethics rules. One of those tasks was so disgusting that I'm not going to write it out at DWT.

While there was wide consensus in the interviews that women were often held to a different standard as bosses, former aides — female and male — said their concerns about Klobuchar's behavior should not be dismissed as gender bias. Many of the aides said they had worked for both men and women, for lawmakers both compassionate and unkind, without encountering anyone else like Klobuchar.

The world of congressional staffs is one of long hours and low pay, with much of the work shouldered by twentysomething junior aides who are learning on the job. Some members of Congress are notorious for round-the-clock phone calls, late-night e-mail and fierce attention to their own press coverage. Klobuchar is among them, but former aides said they were especially troubled by her willingness-- in excess of other senators', they said-- to embarrass staff members over minor missteps or with odd requests.

Most of those interviewed for this article-- describing memories that span from shortly after her election in 2006 to the much more recent past-- discussed their time with Klobuchar on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the senator. These concerns were not idle, they said. Saving potentially damaging e-mails from Klobuchar became something of a last-day ritual, the aides said, in case they ever needed evidence of her conduct for their own reputational protection.

She was known to throw office objects in frustration, including binders and phones, in the direction of aides, they said. Low-level employees were asked to perform duties they described as demeaning, like washing her dishes or other cleaning-- a possible violation of Senate ethics rules, according to veterans of the chamber.

Appraisals of perceived staff incompetence were delivered at all hours of the day and night:

"In 20 years in politics I have never seen worse prep," Klobuchar said in one e-mail, displeased at how a political event had been handled.

"This is the hands down worse thing you have ever given me," she wrote in another, questioning her team's grasp of policy as she rejected its "slop."

"This is the worst press staff I ever had," she announced once to employees, according to an aide present. This was effectively a rite of passage, the aide said: The senator had plainly said the same about both predecessors and successors in the office.

This much is not in dispute: For years, Klobuchar has had among the highest rates of staff turnover in the Senate, according to a review of congressional offices from the website LegiStorm. Over much of her Senate career, no one outpaced Klobuchar on this score; in 2017, two freshman senators, John Kennedy of Louisiana and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, surpassed her.

The churn has produced a bit of a vicious circle. Democrats in Washington say she has struggled to recruit and retain top talent. Some operatives say they have shied away from her 2020 campaign, mindful of Klobuchar's reputation.

Among other concerns, her office's paid parental leave policy has been described as unusual on Capitol Hill. Two people familiar with the policy said that those who took paid leave were effectively required, once they returned, to remain with the office for three times as many weeks as they had been gone. The policy, outlined in an employee handbook, called for those who left anyway to pay back money earned during the weeks they were on leave.

After receiving questions about the policy from the Times, Klobuchar's office said it would be revised. "We offer 12 weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave for our staff and have one of the strongest paid leave policies in the Senate," said a spokeswoman, Elana Ross. "We've never made staff pay back any of their leave and will be changing that language in the handbook." She declined to provide a copy of the current policy as written.

This kind of stuff should point journalists to ask tough questions about how her behavior could portend for the office she's seeking-- although, Maddow might say, that it's so much easier to just let it slide and guarantee herself another first-in-the-nation interview if she ever needs one again on a slow news night. Axios managing editor David Nather pointed out why this matters: "As a new candidate without a well-defined national profile, Klobuchar's treatment of her staff has become a damaging storyline that could overwhelm what she has to say about issues." Klobuchar and her cronies would like to say criticism of her behavior is sexist-- but Amanda Terkel, writing late yesterday for HuffPo recognized that identity politics bullshit argument for what it is: offensive to feminists. One former Klobuchar staffer: "It’s not that there’s not merit to the argument that other men have been abusive and gotten away with it. It doesn’t make it OK for anybody. We don’t say, we haven’t held men accountable in the past for this on Capitol Hill, so why start now?"

Advocates for women in politics have long been focused on dismantling the barriers that kept men in power and shut women out. And while the 2020 Democratic primary is the first time in history when a significant portion of the candidates running are women, many of those barriers still exist. Women still face more questions about their fitness for office in ways that men don’t.

But with women in power, there are going to be good bosses. And there are going to be bad ones. And criticizing a female politician doesn’t mean that it’s a sexist attack. Feminism is, of course, ultimately about more than getting women into elected office.

“The only way to excuse the Klobuchar allegations is to conflate cruelty with feminism,” wrote Jezebel writer Ashley Reese. “It’s the reductive Bad Ass #GirlBoss model of empowerment that celebrates virtually anything women do-- because a woman did it. It’s about getting ahead, not other women.”

Klobuchar faced allegations of mistreating her staff as far back as 2006, when she was the Hennepin County attorney in Minneapolis-- undercutting the Wall Street Journal’s view that the upset aides are just a bunch of snowflake millennials.

  “I’m hearing people saying, ‘They just didn’t know how to work in a high-pressure environment,’ or ‘they couldn’t take the high stakes or the tough boss or the tough feedback.’ It’s incredibly insulting. It’s gaslighting,” said one of the former Klobuchar staffers. “It’s the kind of thing people tell people who have been abused. It’s not abuse, you just didn’t live up to the standards, and that’s your fault.”

Obviously, Klobuchar's shortcomings and foibles aren't the only targets Trump is tucking away in a fold of his malevolent reptilian brain. Right now it doesn't look like New Jersey junior senator Cory Booker is going to break through into the top ranks of major candidates. But if he does, Eliana Johnson's 2014 piece in the National Review will serve as a guide post to paint him as just another corrupt New Jersey pol. A former Booker staffer confirmed the general accuracy of the report, in as much as Booker ran a culture-of-corruption administration in Newark, and the crippling damage it would do to candidate Booker if he ever had to face Trump. "You know as well as I do," he told me, "it's impossible to come up in New Jersey politics without being tainted by corruption. Democratic politics in New Jersey, just like Republican politics in New Jersey is a swamp where anything goes-- and everything does. Has there every been an above-board politician from New Jersey? If you find one, let me know." At the time of the National Review piece, there was bipartisan support for demanding that the New Jersey Legislative Select Committee on Investigation look into "abuses of power and cover-ups" in the seven years that Cory Booker was mayor of Newark. Booker-- like his pal Chris Christie-- has always painted himself as someone working to root out corruption. And isn't that what corrupted politicians always do? Johnson wrote that "the comptroller’s report on the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation (NWCDC) paints a different picture-- of, at best, Booker’s inattentive oversight in allowing the agency, which until recently was responsible for providing all of the city’s water, to fleece millions from the public fisc while his political allies enriched themselves. At worst, it suggests Booker knowingly let his friends profit on the city’s dime." It would be a shame if the Democrats deprive themselves of the corruption weapon in a battle with the most corrupt "president" in American history by nominating a candidate with questionable credibility in the area.

I want to bring up something I referred to last night, Brian Hanley's Medium post about why Democrats ought to nominate Bernie. He enumerated 20 reasons but I'm just going to reproduce one-- the third in his list:

He’s the most popular politician in the country.

While Trump broke the record for the worst favorability ratings of any nominee in history, Sanders maintains the highest favorability scores of any elected official. Sanders continues to be the most popular politician in the country by a large margin. He’s the only one on either side who the majority of voters like. Even a Fox News survey found that no other politician was more well liked and most Republicans say that he’s honest.

This chart was from 2016 but it's still instructive today, especially when you look at some of the other Democrats vying for the nomination, particularly Biden, Gillibrand, Booker and Klobuchar-- the centrists, all liars who the best you can say about is that they don't lie as much as Trump. Oh boy!

Tom Moran Has Watched Cory Booker For 20 Years-- So He Knows A Little Something About The Would-Be President

Tom Moran is the editorial page editor of the Newark Star-Ledger, New Jersey's top newspaper. This morning before dawn he ws writing about Cory Booker's official, but not unexpected, announcement that he is running for president. He's probably not as bad as some of the other moderates-pretending-to-be-progressives but he's not someone I'd want to see as the Democratic nominee. Better than Trump? Duh. Better than Gillibrand, Biden, Bloomberg? Um... probably around the same, maybe a tad better that Gillibrand. Better than Bloomberg. Same as Beto. I wrote about my own impressions here so I won't repeat them today. Instead, I'll repeat Moran's, as he notes that Cory is "about to face brutal and unrelenting attacks from competing Democrats, wary Republicans, and probably a few dozen Russian bots."

He’s a rich target in crazy times like this, because he’s not a normal guy. He’s a vegan and a Rhodes Scholar, and he never touches alcohol or tobacco. He meditates daily, and Tweets quotes from Jewish scholars and Buddhist priests. He once supported vouchers for private schools, and he attends prayer meetings with a Republican senator who thinks climate change is a hoax.

I like all that, myself. We’ll see how it goes over with factory workers in Toledo.

But put that aside. The core criticism of Booker is that he is a showboat with a silver tongue, a man whose real talent is promoting himself, not getting stuff done.

That last part-- about not getting stuff done-- is wildly unfair. He may be famous for that silver tongue, but he carries an iron hammer to work.

In Newark, Booker beat the corrupt old guard and became the first mayor in 45 years to leave office without being indicted. He cut the city’s workforce by 25 percent, a record of austerity unmatched in the state. He doubled the supply of affordable housing. He drove down crime sharply, at least until a cut in state aid forced police layoffs. He was a key figure in expanding charter schools that now educate one-third of city students, and are rated as among the best in the country by outside experts.

Showboat? The man likes a camera, granted. But there’s a lot more to him than that.

In the Senate, Booker had cringe-worthy moment on national TV in September during the confirmation hearings from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh when he threatened to break ethics rules by releasing confidential records on Kavanaugh’s attitudes towards racial profiling. “This is about the closest I’ll probably ever have in my life to an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment,” he said.

Ouch. It was self-aggrandizing, and it turned out the documents had been released several hours earlier by the committee itself. “That was a little over the top,” says Rutgers professor Ross Baker, one of the nation’s leading experts on the U.S. Senate.

But, again, look at the larger record. Booker was a leading negotiator of the most important bipartisan effort since President Trump was elected, the criminal justice reform signed in December that shortened sentences and reformed prison practices. It was a chief goal of Booker’s since his election in 2013, and he nailed it.

A few years back, I wondered how Booker was doing in the fight to get money for a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River, New Jersey’s top priority in Washington. I called Tony Coscia, the chairman of Amtrak. He gushed about Booker’s success in finding support from Republicans for a critical low-interest loan program.

“It was stalled, and he played a huge role in getting it moving,” Coscia said. “Now we’re making real progress.”

Sorry, folks, the effort to finance the tunnel has gone south since Trump took office. But you get the idea.

“The showboat accusation is a cheap shot,” Baker concluded.

Could Booker win? Baker believes he has a shot, but he wonders if America is ready to elect a second African-American president four years after Barack Obama.

“Glass ceilings that are broken are often repaired, unfortunately,” he said.

Aside from race, Booker has important vulnerabilities. The Newark police, on Booker’s watch, accumulated a horrifying record on race and brutality that prompted federal intervention in 2016. A Justice Department review found that police targeted blacks in a stop-and-frisk operation that was out of control and used excess force as a matter of routine.

“That stuff was going on way before Booker,” says the current mayor, Ras Baraka. “I grew up in the city and I know how those guys behaved, and some still do behave.”

Booker is one of the Senate’s leading recipients of money from Wall Street and Big Pharma, and that may cost him in a Democratic primary as well.

It’s a tough rap because Booker does not dance for those dollars. He wants to sharply raise taxes on Wall Street by closing the carried interest loophole, and he opposes efforts to soften the Dodd-Frank banking regulations. On pharma, he co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Bernie Sanders to allow imports of cheap Canadian drugs and wants to use Medicare’s market power to negotiate lower drug prices, both positions deeply hostile to the industry.

Still, the money trail from these industries into Booker’s treasury will make for a spicy 30-second attack ad.

A final problem: The staggering corruption at the Newark Watershed that was revealed after Booker left office-- one manager alone admitted taking $1 million in bribes. It is a non-profit agency overseeing the city’s watershed properties and delivery systems, but Booker was an ex-officio trustee and never attended a single board meeting.

I won’t try to handicap Booker’s chances, especially after the Shock and Horror of 2016.

I just hope that if he loses, it’s not because he’s seen as a tool of Wall Street, or a showboat without substance. Those things are just wrong.

Baraka used to slam Booker as a showboat, back when they were rivals. “Whenever there’s a real issue in the city that needs to be resolved, the mayor is nowhere to be found,” Baraka said of Booker in 2013. “The only way you can see the mayor is if you turn on Meet the Press.

But Baraka has changed his tune. “I did once think he was just glory seeking. But he does the work, whether it’s business development or crime, he does the work. And he’s found his voice in the Senate. He’s fearless. He’s passionate. Ten years ago, I never would have said that. But even my mother supports Cory Booker now.”

Six years ago, I was in the newsroom when a report came across that Booker had charged into a burning building to save a woman screaming for help. Oh please, I thought.

But we looked into it, and it was true. Booker burned his hand when flaming debris fell from the ceiling as he charged through the smoke-filled house carrying the woman, Zina Hodge, over his shoulder. He needed medical treatment for smoke inhalation.

Hodge later said she was glad to be alive. Her mom added this, on Booker: “I think he’s a super mayor, and he should stay mayor and then be president.”

That’s one vote. Now comes the long march to drum up millions more.

A couple of friends and I were sitting around trying to come up with a one word phrase to help Nancy with her official portrait of Cory for DWT. We settled on an unflattering term: chameleon.