WASHINGTON - Congressmen Mark Pocan (D-WI) and Donald Norcross (D-NJ) are announcing the creation of the Labor Caucus, intended to advance the needs of the labor movement, combat the issues facing working families, and connect legislators directly with unions and union leaders. The new caucus will be organized by union members of Congress—Representatives Pocan and Norcross are both decades-long union members in the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), respectively.
“President-Elect Joe Biden’s new administration gives the Democratic Party the opportunity to reprioritize working families at the center of our legislative agenda,” said Congressman Pocan. “Under Donald Trump, we’ve seen the erosion of labor rights, rise in union-busting, and the prioritization of corporate profits over working people’s livelihoods and safety. In the 117th Congress, we must reaffirm our dedication to strengthening unions and helping works by urgently passing legislation like the PRO Act and the Raise the Wage Act. It’s time for working people to have a voice in Congress again.”
“Labor has shaped my life, taking me from the construction site to Congress,” said Congressman Norcross. “While the Trump Administration has tried to diminish labor rights, President-Elect Joe Biden’s incoming Administration understands the dignity of work and that workers’ rights are human rights. Every American worker should have the opportunity to earn a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, and working families deserve a bigger voice in Congress. I look forward to working together with our brothers and sisters in Labor to pass legislation for American workers and their futures.”
“It is absolutely imperative that we return this country back into the hands of working people and the Labor Caucus will do just that,” said Shane Larson, Senior Director for Government Affairs and Policy at the Communications Workers of America. “Congressman Pocan and Norcross are card-carrying union members and we are proud to support their efforts to prioritize workers’ rights and the labor movement in Congress. The Democratic Party has long been the party of unions and working families, and the Labor Caucus will ensure that legacy endures in every Congress to come.”
The New Jersey CWA was less supportive of Norcross in 2011. In fact, neither the CWA nor the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) endorsed Norcross, then a state senator, or any of the other South Jersey DINOs connected with the Norcross machine, for reelection after they had joined with their Republican colleagues in the legislature and Chris Christie to gut pensions and benefits packages for public employees.
The rift in New Jersey labor wasn’t only between public and private employee unions; it was a division between the building trades unions and the rest of labor, as I explained in this 2011 DWT post.
This dubious alliance with Norcross tells us a lot about the purportedly progressive Pocan. With friends like him, avowed enemies of the progressive movement are superfluous.
The Norcross Machine Is Determined To Pick Another Congress Member To Replace Their Jeff Van Drew
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The DCCC had been trying to recruit Jeff Van Drew for years. He was the perfect candidate for them-- a South Jersey machine-backed hack in the state legislature who tended to vote with the GOP more frequently than any of his colleagues. Although Obama comfortably won the district (NJ-02) twice, the long-time mainstream conservative congressman, Frank LoBiondo, seemed untouchable. The machine and the DCCC decided that the only way too beat him would be with an extremely right-wing Democrat: Van Drew. But Van Drew wasn’t interested in giving up his safe seat. So he flirted with the DCCC but never but out-- until LoBiondo announced he was finished… and retiring. At that point, Van Drew jumped right in with support for the machine, the DCCC and even his colleagues in the state Senate who were eager to be rid of him and pass the Van Drew problem on to DC Dems. “We were delighted,” one of his former Trenton colleagues told me, “to see him take his anti-environmental, anti-gay, anti-women, NRA A+ to Washington… Good riddance!” His decision to jump the fence didn’t surprise anyone in Jersey politics-- and shouldn’t have surprised anyone who reads DWT since we had been predicting it for months… and celebrating it once knew for certain that he was about to make it official. Reactionary Blue Dogs-- especially intellectually-impaired ones and especially ones who live at Fox News the way he does and who say the kinds of anti-Democratic crap he does, usually switch parties. It was just a matter of when. A couple of days ago, Ben Jacobs of New York Magazine explained how it happened. Basically, he wrote “Van Drew panicked. Last week, the first-term conservative Democrat polled his district about his opposition to impeachment. The results were very one-sided. Over 70 percent of Democratic primary voters would be less likely to support him if he voted against impeaching Donald Trump. Van Drew immediately went silent and was unreachable by allies [DCCC chair Cheri Bustos] in the party. The next day, he was meeting with Donald Trump at the White House to discuss switching parties. Within 48 hours, word had leaked out about his decision and, within a week, Van Drew was on cable news pledging his “undying support” to a president whom he voted against 93 percent of the time."
A longtime state senator from South Jersey with a reputation for being a “right-leaning moderate” in Trenton, Van Drew “was used to getting some backlash from members of his own party who didn’t think he was sufficiently liberal,” said one New Jersey operative who worked with him in the past. But the operative said “this whole process started happening” when Van Drew became one of two Democrats to vote against opening the impeachment inquiry on October 31. Advisers had urged Van Drew to vote yes to keep his options open, but the New Jersey representative barged ahead. The initial vote against opening the inquiry came as a particular shock to local Democrats only days before state legislative elections in New Jersey. “People were freaking out,” said Michael Suleiman, the chair of the Atlantic County Democratic Committee. Van Drew offered a variety of reasons for opposing impeachment. Sometimes he argued the process was ill-advised with an election less than a year away. On other occasions, he said that he didn’t see enough evidence to convict Trump. One well-connected South Jersey Democrat told New York, “He never really had a rationale that was consistent. You need to have your own narrative. Not a Republican-lite narrative, but a Jeff Van Drew narrative.” However, the New Jersey operative noted that Van Drew did not seem to view his opposition to impeachment as being “pro-Trump at first,” but simply an effort to be reflective of his district. And then “he started spiraling.”
Although Jacobs asserts that the 2018 election was “relatively easy,” he’s wrong. It should have been relatively easy. The GOP put up a pyscho-clown that even Republican voters were uncomfortable with. Van Drew out-spent him $1,877,531 to $299,475, Van Drew only managed 52.9% of the vote-- less than Obama did both times he ran. DCCC and its allies spent another million dollars smearing Republican Seth Grossman and the NRCC ignored the race entirely. In the end, Van Drew won the 4 biggest counties and lost the 4 smallest, although he didn’t live up to expectations in Cape May or Gloucester. Turnout wasn’t as strong as it should have been, primarily because progressives just didn’t want to cast their ballots for someone who holds Van drew’s reactionary ideology… “Van Drew,” admitted Jacobs, “felt bruised that his victory was not by the margins he was accustomed to in his past legislative wins, according to the South Jersey Democrat-- even though federal races are far more partisan than state-level races. The result prompted Van Drew to go back to his playbook from his days in Trenton and try to demonstrate his bipartisan credentials.” Exactly the wrong move.
Although the New Jersey operative described Van Drew as very attentive to polls in the state legislature, the congressman had long been reluctant to actually put a poll in the field on impeachment. It was suggested that he knew the data “would put him in a box” and he was afraid to see it. When he finally commissioned a poll, in conjunction with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he “genuinely freaked out” when he saw the results. From that moment, it was only several days before Van Drew defected to the GOP. Former White House political director Bill Stepien and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie tried to clear a path for the congressman among Republicans in the Garden State. Kellyanne Conway, who was the only White House staffer present for Van Drew’s meeting with Trump, played a vital role as well. Van Drew was the first member of Congress to switch parties in almost a decade. The last one to do so, Parker Griffith, a one-term congressman from Alabama who switched from Democrat to Republican in 2009, told New York, “Ordinarily, it’s a mistake to switch parties. I made a mistake by switching parties. The mistake I made-- I made an assumption that everybody knew as much about politics as we did in D.C., and it really is an emotional decision.” Griffith was skeptical of Van Drew’s choice. “I hope he’s got a better handle on what he’s doing than I did.” The former congressman compared Van Drew’s Oval Office handshake with Trump to “fondling a rattlesnake.” He added, “I’m sure it made him feel good temporarily, but I don’t think Trump makes friends well, and doesn’t keep them well.” Van Drew now faces a number of political obstacles. As Suleiman told New York, he is “now persona non grata with Democrats.” The local county chair, who had been fiercely critical of Van Drew’s stance on impeachment before his defection, said, “No one likes a weasel, and no one likes a turncoat.” Already, several Democrats are running for the party’s nomination in 2020. Brigid Callahan Harrison, a political-science professor at Montclair State University, is currently considered the favorite.
She’s certainly the favorite of the grotesquely corrupt Norcross machine that had made Van Drew’s career. And because Norcross is behind her, Bustos and the DCCC are behind her. Trump is behind Van Drew, of course, but there were already 3 loyal Republicans running against him when he switched parties, including a very wealthy self-funder, Dave Richter. Trump will hold one of his bund rallies in NJ-02 early in the New Year.
Griffith, who eventually returned to the Democratic Party after losing his primary as a newly minted Republican in 2010, noted the personal cost that Van Drew could face as well. “He’s alienated a lot of people who put their faith in him,” said Griffith. Reflecting on his own experience, the former Alabama congressman said, “When you look in the faces of people you disappoint, and the tears in their eyes, and to this day it breaks my heart to think about it.” The hope for Van Drew is that his embrace of Trump will help convince voters that his party switch was motivated by a crisis of conscience, rather than a crisis of polling, and ease any bitterness. But it is a big risk for the freshman congressman who represents Atlantic City-- a community that’s had bad experiences betting on Trump in the past.
On Monday, Greg Giroux wrote for Bloomberg News that Van Drew’s chances to win are iffy “House party-switchers,” he wrote, “have a mixed electoral record, with some going on to win re-election while others facing primary defeats by voters unconvinced by their political conversion… Even with presidential support, Van Drew can’t expect a coronation in the June 2020 Republican primary against opponents who have been campaigning for months to unseat him. ‘As a lifelong conservative Republican, I have a message for liberal Switcheroo Van Drew: Bring it on,’ Bob Patterson, one of the candidates running in the Republican primary for New Jersey’s 2nd District, said in a Dec. 19 statement. Patterson criticized Van Drew as ‘pro-choice, pro-amnesty and anti-Trump.’” But can that message win when Trump is behind him? Brigid Harrison, the Machine/DCCC candidate, lives in Longport, which has always been a very exclusive area of the shore… kind of an “old money” area-- and the wrong look for the Democratic Party. Ashley Bennett announced on Friday. Last year she was elected to the Atlantic County Board of Freeholders, having gained a good reputation for challenging incumbent Freeholder John Carman after he posted a meme critical of the national Women’s March. Like most of the candidates running, Bennett is African-American. The Machine, of coursed, insisted on a white person. Amy Kennedy-- wife of Patrick Kennedy-- is also running. They live in Brigantine, another exclusive community for wealthy white people. Other candidates who have already thrown their hats into the ring are John Francis, a West Cape May commissioner, who spent “nearly three decades as a planet walker, playing the banjo and ‘traveling the globe by foot and said with a message of environmental respect and responsibility. He spent seventeen years without speaking.”
Another Freeholder, Jack Surrency, from Cumberland County, is also running for the seat. We’ll spend some time trying to figure out who the best candidate or candidates are as alternatives to the Norcorss Machine’s Van Drew and Harrison. Meanwhile, if you're interested in helping keep the DCCC from recruiting and electing more Jeff Van Drew types, please consider supporting the candidates here, at the Primary A Blue Dog ActBlue page. Have't they done enough damage to the Democratic Party already-- and not just in New Jersey?
Will Steve Sweeney Feel Bad If There's A School Gun Massacre In New Jersey This Month?
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Who likes Van Drew more, the DCCC or the NRA?
-by Jersey Jim On March 26, the New Jersey Assembly passed a package of six gun control bills that Gov. Phil Murphy had promised to sign. Each of the bills had at least 12 sponsors and co-sponsors in the Assembly, and several Democratic state Senators were eager to vote for them, too. But two months later, gun control legislation still hasn’t reached the governor’s desk. Why not? The bills are stalled in the Senate. They’ve been passed by the appropriate Senate committees, but Senate President Steve Sweeney has refused to put them on the agenda of the full Senate until that body’s next meeting on June 7-- two days after the primary election. Now is it beginning to make sense? It does if you know anything about the ultra-corrupt South Jersey Democratic machine headed by George Norcross. With the retirement of Republican Rep. Frank LoBiondo, there’s an open seat in NJ-02. The execrable Jeff Van Drew, the most conservative "Democrat" in the state legislature, is one of four candidates for that seat in the Democratic primary, and he enjoys the Norcross machine’s full support. Van Drew is also the only one with a long history as an NRA ally-- a history he’s now trying to hide. He’s is so closely identified with the NRA that Parkland massacre survivor David Hogg cited him as an example of a Democrat who’s no better than a Republican. If Van Drew votes against gun control, he risks offending Democratic primary voters who live in the Congressional district he seeks to represent, but not in LD-1, the legislative district he represents in the state Senate. LD-1 is more conservative than the rest of the Congressional district. If he votes for any of those measures, he will certainly offend a substantial number of pro-gun voters in LD-1, Democrats, Republicans and Independents alike, without whose votes he might lose in November. And if he fails to vote on those bills, he’ll offend everybody. As Senate president, and as the Norcross Machine’s most important single asset in Trenton, Sweeney will do whatever Norcross wants; and DNC member Norcross, who used his clout to install his younger brother in the NJ-01 House seat after Rob Andrews resigned in disgrace in 2014, is all but obsessed with getting control of a second seat in Congress. That’s why Sweeney is delaying the final votes. For all his flaws, Sweeney himself has a relatively good record on gun control, as do most of the legislators connected with the Norcross machine. In fact, several of them are sponsors or co-sponsors of the pending gun bills. But for Norcross and Sweeney, saving Jeff Van Drew from political embarrassment is apparently more important than saving lives. Van Drew enjoys the support of the Democratic establishment in Washington, too. He’s not only on the DCCC’s Red-to-Blue list; he’s also been endorsed by both the New Dems and the Blue Dogs-- a corrupt Beltway establishment hat trick! But will that be enough to get him into Congress? A Van Drew mailer paid for by Patriot Majority USA, a dark money Democratic establishment group, boasts that Van Drew is "endorsed by every county Democratic party in the state." That wording is misleading. What they mean is not every county party, but every county executive committee. And in South Jersey, the membership of those committees consists almost entirely of insiders connected to the Norcross machine.
Beyond his current Senate district, consisting of Cape May County and a few neighboring communities in Atlantic and Cumberland Counties, Van Drew has little support among rank and file Democrats. Even in LD-1, he probably couldn’t win a general election without the votes of gun-loving Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. In presidential, gubernatorial and US Senate elections, LD-1 usually goes Republican, while NJ-02 is less consistently Republican. In five of the last seven presidential elections, the Democratic candidates-- Clinton, Gore and Obama-- carried NJ-02. And Democrat Bill Hughes held that seat for 20 years before LoBiondo was first elected in 1994. Trump won NJ-02 in 2016, but we’re already seeing the same kind of buyer’s remorse there that Trump supporters in Michigan and Wisconsin are feeling after 16 months of a Trump Administration. So Van Drew is no shoe-in in November. But that doesn’t matter to corporate Democrats who would rather lose with a corrupt candidate of their own choosing than win with a progressive. A Roll Call story last week reported how Blue Dog PAC co-chair Kurt Schrader approached Van Drew. When Van Drew complained about "having a tough time getting things done" in Trenton, Schrader told him he should run for Congress "because frankly, with Republicans in control, you’re going to find you’re going to have a lot more opportunity than you did back home," adding, "you’ll be the decision-maker, because you’ll be the swing vote." Schrader must have known how unhappy Van Drew is about being pressured to soften some of his right-wing positions. In January, Van Drew removed his name from Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 35, which proposes amending the state constitution to permit a law requiring parental notification when a minor seeks an abortion. (In 2000, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that a 1999 parental notification law violated the state constitution.) Van Drew had been listed as a prime sponsor of that resolution in this and the two previous Legislatures, and was the only "Democrat" with his name on it each time. Van Drew also reluctantly took his name off a bill (S-539) to reinstate the death penalty in New Jersey. Those capitulations have not gone unnoticed in right-wing circles. The Jersey Conservative web site noted his withdrawal of support for parental notification and the death penalty. And the Daily Caller ran a hit piece by Rick Trader, host of the obscure Conservative Commandos internet radio show (where Sharron Angle is sometimes his co-host!), calling Van Drew "one of the most fake conservative Democrats running for office in 2018." With the organizational support of the Norcross machine, and with 6.5 times the war chest of his leading primary opponent-- not to mention the outside spending of "centrist" (read, "corporate") Democratic PAC’s-- Van Drew is almost certain to win the primary. But November won’t be a cinch. He’ll need to hold on to all the Independents and Republicans who have supported him in his state legislative races. He’ll also have to turn out the kind of Democrats who usually don’t vote in the midterms. That will be hard, because conservatives like Van Drew don’t excite the base. And if he does win in November, it will be no victory for progressives.
Elizabeth Warren is from Oklahoma and got politically active when she had already moved to Massachusetts. Watch the video of her speaking to Wells Fargo’s chief executive Timothy Sloan at the Senate Banking Committee yesterday. She's my idea of a great senator. "At best," she told the immensely powerful and corrupt bankster, "you were incompetent, and at worst, you were complicit. Either way, you should be fired." Can New Jersey politics produce a political leader like Elizabeth Warren? Unfortunately, no. So... what's the matter with New Jersey? The simple answer is... simple: corrupt political bosses at the heads of powerful machines. A better question is why do voters allow themselves to be trapped in this kind of pernicious system. Richard Moser tried answering at Counterpunch this week: New Jersey Is A One-Party State. He doesn't go into any history pre-Christie though. "When it comes down to what really matters-- power and money-- New Jersey is run by machine politics and the insiders know how to wheel and deal," he wrote. "Power in the Garden State is managed by a shifting alliance of political machines, ready to cut deals, share power and scratch each others back. At least that is how its been since Chris Christie came to rule the roost." Think about this: Christie was endorsed by 60 Democratic Party officials including major machine bosses like Union City scumbag, Sen. Brian Stack, boss of the Hudson County Democratic Machine, and Essex County scumbag Joe DiVincenzo, each considered among the most corrupt men in contemporary American politics.
Christie owes his rise to some of the most toxic forces in his state-- powerful bosses who ensure that his vow to clean up New Jersey will never come to pass. He has allowed them to escape scrutiny, rewarded them for their support, and punished their enemies. All along, even as it looked like Christie was attacking the machine, he was really just mastering it.
MacGillis continues to describe the gears and wheels:
In most of the United States, the big political machines have been broken, or reduced to wheezing versions of their former selves. In New Jersey, though, they’ve endured like nowhere else. The state has retained its excessively local distribution of power-- 566 municipalities, 21 counties, and innumerable commissions and authorities, all of them generous repositories of contracts and jobs. The place still has bona fide bosses—perhaps not as colorful as the old ones, but about as powerful. The bosses drum up campaign cash from people and firms seeking public jobs and contracts, and direct it to candidates, who take care of the bosses and the contributors-- a self-perpetuating cycle…
The relationship between Democratic machine bosses and Christie was so cozy that in the 2013 gubernatorial race the Democratic Party failed to support its own candidate, Barbara Buono.
In her concession speech Buono thanked her supporters who:
“withstood the onslaught of Betrayal from our own party… The Democratic political bosses, some elected, some not made a deal with this governor….They did not do it for the State they did it out of a desire to help themselves.”
[One of the best and most inspiring political leaders in New Jersey then moved to the West Coast.] The machines effectively deprive the voters of New Jersey of a free, fair and competitive election. This time around it’s Christie that “kicks sand” in the face of the Republican candidate even thought his very own Lt. Governor. Guadagno is way down in the polls and millions short. After Christie’s gross absenteeism during his vain run for the Presidency, Bridgegate, Beachgate, plundering of the treasury with record giveaways to favored corporations, the protection and rescue of Exxon and the unprecedented low approval ratings to show for it, there is nothing Christie can or will do to help. Referring to his miserable poll ratings Christie said, “Poll numbers matter when you’re running for something….And I don’t care.” He used New Jersey for his personal gain and trashed the Republican Party, but no worries, now its the Democrats turn. The big money knows the game and former Christie donors have switched to supporting Murphy. A Republican politician, Chris Brown, is quoted in PoliticoNewJersey as saying:
I can only speak for myself and say that I believe there has been an unholy alliance between Governor Christie and Senator Sweeney, which I don’t believe is in the best interest of the people I represent in Atlantic County or this state….”
Where are the lesser of two evils in New Jersey? When it came time to attack workers they were one big happy family. As reported in The Nation:
[W]hen Christie launched an aggressive assault on the pensions and health-care benefits of state employees in 2011, he did so with the support of Norcross, DiVincenzo, and other Democratic bosses, whose allies in the Assembly joined the Republican governor to give him the margin he needed to pass the changes despite massive protests outside the State House by the NJEA, the CWA, and other unions.In June of that year, Wisniewski appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, where he joined her in bemoaning the state of the Democratic Party and added, in regard to the pension-“reform” fiasco: “We fought real hard, but unfortunately there were some Democrats who chose to side with the Republicans on this bill.”
Some Democrats? Just the most powerful Democrats in the state. Watch this revealing video of Joseph DiVincenzo, Democratic machine boss of Essex county endorse Chris Christie of Governor. DiVincenzo took the opportunity to champion Christie’s attacks against workers. DiVincenzo then accurately praises Shelia Oliver, now Democratic candidate for Lt. Governor, for moving the Christie agenda when Oliver was Speaker of the New Jersey General Assembly. Joe DiVincenzo is Shelia Oliver’s political mentor and boss on her day job. Machine much?
New Jersey’s supreme Democratic boss is also a long-term ally of Christie. George Norcross and his brothers Phil and Donald have built their careers on the city of Camden. After 30 years of such leadership the people of Camden are desperately poor and plagued by all the problems extreme poverty includes. Read this scathing critique of Norcorss’s recent attempt to develop Camden. George Norcross lives a life of luxury greasing Christie’s wheels and hanging out at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago where he can easily toss the $200,000 a year membership fee to rub shoulders with the rich and powerful. Camden gets poverty, crime, violence and silence. Norcross gets caviar, cash and Trump’s company. The machine bosses decided their narrow interest was far more important than giving the people of New Jersey a real choice. And so we got Chris Christie delivered on a platter by the Democrats themselves. Now its the Democrat’s turn. And if you think there is no payoff, then tell me why the cash-strapped state government approved a $86 million tax break for an insurance company run by-- you guessed it-- New Jersey’s most powerful Democrat, George Norcross. Any complaints from supposed Republican Chris Christie for lining the pockets of the leading Democrat? None. One hand washes the other and the people of New Jersey get the shaft. And the shaft is coming. According to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, New Jersey is ranked 50th, among US states for its fiscal health. Will Murphy repeat Corzine by making fine sounding promises followed by austerity? There is only one reason that New Jersey-- one of the riches states in the richest country in the history of the world-- has budget problems and that, in the end, is the machine. And Phil “Goldman-Sachs” Murphy has signaled his acceptance and alliance with the machine by appointing tried and true team player Shelia Oliver as his running mate. Murphy does not have to run hard. The fix is in and he is way ahead on money and polls. Why have a ground game when the real game is to marry New Jersey’s old-school machine with the most greedy, ruthless players on Wall Street and on Trump’s cabinet: Goldman Sachs. Machine meets machine, falls in love and we live unhappily ever after. But, what is broken in Jersey can be fixed in Jersey if we have the courage and vision to restore competition, democracy and basic honestly to politics. This election we are lucky to have a real alternative with the Green Party candidates for governor Seth-Kaper Dale and Lisa Durden. It’s time to stop voting for the bosses unless we want to be political prisoners for the rest of our lives.
Who Better To Replace Robert Menendez Than Rush Holt?
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-by Jersey Jack
"Everything's legal in New Jersey." -Alexander Hamilton
How is the State of New Jersey like the Democratic Party? Both have image problems. And those image problems converge in the corruption trial of Robert Menendez, the state’s senior U. S. Senator. Menendez is facing bribery charges stemming from his intercession with various federal agencies on a variety of matters for his friend, contributor and co-defendant, Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Florida ophthalmologist. (The indictment is available here.) His trial began on Wednesday, September 6, and it’s expected to last six about eight weeks, but could go past November 7, when New Jersey will elect its next governor. If Menendez is convicted, he won’t automatically lose his Senate seat. He won’t have to resign, and he may not resign until he’s exhausted all his appeals. And the Senate won’t expel him, either. Expulsion requires a two-thirds vote. At least 15 Democrats would have to vote with all 52 of their Republican colleagues, and they won’t do that before Republican Gov. Chris Christie’s term ends in mid-January-- not when it looks like New Jersey’s next governor will be a Democrat.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Murphy holds a commanding lead in the polls over his Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno. Governor Bridgegate is the most unpopular governor in the state’s history, and it’s hard to imagine any member of his administration, even one not implicated in the Bridgegate scandal, winning the election. If Murphy wins-- and if Menendez leaves office after Murphy is sworn in-- Murphy could appoint a Democrat to complete Menendez’ current term. Of course, the Republicans won’t want to expel Menendez next year if it means giving Murphy the chance to appoint another Democrat, who could then run for a full term as an incumbent next year. But if the trial doesn’t go well, Menendez will face pressure to step down both from the New Jersey Democratic establishment and from his fellow Democrats in the Senate. And if Menendez does resign, who will Murphy pick to replace him? Former Congressman Rush Holt would be the ideal choice. Holt is the polar opposite of a corporate Democrat. He supports single payer health care, a financial transaction tax, and strengthening Social Security by eliminating the cap. And perhaps most important, Holt, a physicist by training, understands anthropogenic climate change. He knows that we need better environmental regulations, and that we need to develop renewable energy as quickly as possible—and his scientific background would make him a formidable opponent of climate denying Republicans in Senate debates. As longtime DWT readers may remember, Blue America supported Holt in the special August, 2013 primary for an unexpired Senate term, following the death of Frank Lautenberg in June. Holt lost that race to consummate corporatist and shameless self-promoter Cory Booker, who enjoyed generous financial support from Wall Street, as well as the backing of the New Jersey Democratic establishment, most notably that of South Jersey machine boss George Norcross. And now,according to Newark Star-Ledger columnist Tom Moran, Norcross wants to move his brother Donald, who currently represents New Jersey’s First Congressional District, into the Senate-- and he still wants to control the House seat, too. From Moran’s August 27 column;
Rep. Norcross, of course, is the kid brother of George Norcross, the political boss from South Jersey whose team controls seven votes in the Senate and 16 in the Assembly, give or take. By appointing Norcross, Murphy would be doing a huge solid for a man he’s going to need to govern successfully. And it could set off a game of musical chairs that would help Murphy even more, many Democrats say. Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-Gloucester) could fill the vacant seat in Congress. And Sweeney's post as Senate president could go to a Democrat from northern New Jersey, presumably a close ally of Murphy’s. Everyone wins.
Murphy is trying to present himself as an outsider and a progressive—not an easy sell for a former Goldman Sachs executive. Toward that end, he’s now an advocate of public banking, and that’s helping. He’s even had one of his campaign videos on that subject embedded in a page on the website of the non-profit Public Banking Institute. But if Murphy cuts a deal with Norcross, he’ll instantly destroy whatever credibility he now enjoys with progressives. The Norcross brothers are opposed to single payer health care and GMO labeling, and in favor of charter schools, fracking and pipelines. They’re anathema to progressives. If Murphy appoints Donald Norcross to the Senate, he will further tarnish not only the image of New Jersey, but also that of the Democratic Party. On the other hand, if he appoints a real progressive like Rush Holt, that would help improve the image of his state and of his party. And if the Democratic Party is going to take over Congress next year, it will need all the help it can get.
New Jersey Political Bosses-- Very Bipartisan: Norcross Is The Glue That Binds Christie And Trumpf
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During Christie's term, Democratic boss George Norcross has become more powerful than ever
So far this weekend, crackpot right-wing governor Paul LePage (R-ME) and crackpot ex-Governor Jan Brewer (AZ) endorsed Herr Trumpf in the wake of Chris Christie joining Team Trumpf. Herr was also endorsed by French Nazi Jean-Marie Le Pen. But the big story is still the bully bromance between Herr and Christie and how a combination of pure opportunism and Christie's psychotic hatred for Rubio drove the train.
Pro-Publica star investigative journalist Alec MacGillis, writing for the New Republictook Chris Christie apart two years before he infuriated the Republican establishment by endorsing Herr Trumpf for president. It's worth revisiting today because, where the Republican establishment hasn't had much coherent to say beyond catty remarks about Christie's penchant for overeating and blowing up like a balloon, MacGillis started off by pointing out that the once popular governor "has been so singularly successful at constructing his own mythology-- as a reformer, a crusader, a bipartisan problem-solver--that people have never really seen him clearly" as the criminally minded corrupt stinking pile of garbage he has always been. His investigation leads him to conclude what many sensed all along, namely that "the problem with Christie isn’t merely that he is a bully. It’s that his political career is built on a rotten foundation. Christie owes his rise to some of the most toxic forces in his state-- powerful bosses who ensure that his vow to clean up New Jersey will never come to pass. He has allowed them to escape scrutiny, rewarded them for their support, and punished their enemies. All along, even as it looked like Christie was attacking the machine, he was really just mastering it." Christie's big claim to fame-- being appointed a U.S. Attorney by Bush was a simple business transaction. Christie raised $350,000 for Bush's campaign, enough for Christie to qualify as a Bush "Pioneer" and contributed nearly 30 grand of his own money to GOP candidates and bought himself an appointment despite having no experience whatsoever in criminal law. Christie won the approval of New Jersey's senior senator, Robert Torricelli, a criminal himself looking for an ally for the scandal cases under investigation by the U.S. Attorney's office. Soon after taking over, Christie got rid of the chief investigator, Michael Guadagno, which is credited for keeping Torricelli, a Democrat, out of prison.
To say that corruption was a problem in the Garden State was an epic understatement—its political system might as well have been expressly designed to facilitate public fraud. The state’s official history is one of legendary self-dealers: Enoch “Nucky” Johnson built and ruled Prohibition-era Atlantic City from the ninth floor of the Ritz-Carlton. The midcentury mayor of Jersey City, Frank Hague, earned a salary of $8,500 a year and yet left office with a fortune of $2 million. His signature accoutrement, according to Jersey lore, was a desk with an outward-facing drawer in which visitors would deposit their bribes. As one mayor of Newark memorably put it, “There’s no money in being a congressman, but you can make a million bucks as mayor.” In most of the United States, the big political machines have been broken, or reduced to wheezing versions of their former selves. In New Jersey, though, they’ve endured like nowhere else. The state has retained its excessively local distribution of power-- 566 municipalities, 21 counties, and innumerable commissions and authorities, all of them generous repositories of contracts and jobs. The place still has bona fide bosses-- perhaps not as colorful as the old ones, but about as powerful. The bosses drum up campaign cash from people and firms seeking public jobs and contracts, and direct it to candidates, who take care of the bosses and the contributors-- a self-perpetuating cycle as reliable as photosynthesis. ...Fighting public fraud, [Christie] announced, would be his office’s top priority after terrorism. “Corrupt politicians will steal your trust, your taxes, and your hope,” he told a New Jersey crowd in 2007. The problem was not, he noted, “an insufficient number of targets.”
Soon after Christie took office, Essex County’s Republican executive, Jim Treffinger, was out walking his dog when seven police cruisers surrounded him. Treffinger knew he was under investigation for awarding no-show jobs to friends and extorting campaign donations in exchange for contracts. He had repeatedly offered to surrender to authorities when the time came. Instead, his wife and daughter watched from the house as he was thrown up against a car and frisked, an image that appeared in the next day’s Star-Ledger, which had been tipped off to the arrest. At first, Christie said the arrest had been left to the marshals. But later, he cast Treffinger’s treatment in moral terms. Corrupt officials, he said, shouldn’t be coddled-- they were “worse than the street criminal because the street criminal never pretends to be anything but what he or she is.” (Local lawyers wondered whether the public shaming might be linked to Treffinger’s observation, caught on a wiretap, that Christie was a “fat fuck” who “wouldn’t know a law book from a cookbook.”) “The perception was that the U.S. attorney was sending a message,” one lawyer told me. The next seven years unfolded like a never-ending perp walk, as Christie racked up more than 130 convictions and guilty pleas for elected and appointed officials. He had a knack for extracting the maximum p.r. from every arrest or indictment. “The office leaked like a sieve,” one Democratic operative recalls. “I had reporters calling me at four in morning and saying, [so and so] is going to get pinched.” Democrats howled that Christie was on a partisan witch-hunt, since he targeted so many more Ds than Rs. But it was hard to take such accusations very seriously. After all, New Jersey’s power structure was dominated by Democrats, and Christie was uncovering undeniable cases of abuse. One state senator pleaded guilty for accepting a low-show job at a medical school in exchange for state grants, another to accepting a $25,000 “success fee” for helping a mining company obtain permit approvals. Longtime Newark Mayor Sharpe James got 27 months on charges stemming from the sale of steeply discounted city properties to an ex-girlfriend. (James’s successor, Cory Booker, is the first mayor of Newark not to be indicted since 1962.) Besides, to accuse Christie of protecting Republicans over Democrats was missing the point. True, his office had knocked out a swath of New Jersey’s biggest Democratic power brokers and weakened their organizations in crucial parts of the state. But that meant the bosses left standing had only grown stronger. In 2002, an insurance firm in Mt. Laurel received an unexpected e-mail from a man named George Norcross. Congratulations, Norcross told the firm: It had won a big contract for the Delaware River Port Authority, which oversees four bridges in the Philadelphia area. The e-mail was unexpected because the firm hadn’t bid for the job. But there was no need for thanks. The company was simply expected to send Norcross’s insurance company $410,000 over the next few years, as a “finder’s fee.” This is how things work in the world of George Norcross III. Officially, he is the supremely wealthy chairman of Conner Strong & Buckelew, one of the largest insurance firms in the nation; the chairman of Cooper University Hospital in Camden; and, as of last year, the majority owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Unofficially, he is the most powerful man in New Jersey never to have held elected office. Close observers of state politics have estimated that more than 50 elected officials in South Jersey owe their positions to Norcross (including his brother, a state senator [Donald Norcrosss, more recently one of the more conservative Democratic members of the U.S. House]). Much of the money he raises for candidates comes from people and companies eager to secure government work or development deals, as documented over the years by his local paper, the Courier-Post, among others. Norcross’s own firm holds sway over New Jersey’s large municipal insurance market. (He declined to comment for this article.) “George is probably the smartest politician we have now in the state of New Jersey,” says former Republican State Senator John Bennett. “He knows where the power is and goes to the power. Whether that power is a Republican or Democrat.” ...Norcross is silver-haired and impeccably dressed and runs his operation out of well-appointed boardrooms. He is only foul-mouthed in private. On numerous occasions, Norcross’s operation has come under legal scrutiny-- from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), state investigators, and the FBI. The cases are labyrinthine, but they all involve some dubious overlap of his many public and private interests. One case in particular threatened to get real traction. In the early 2000s, several New Jersey attorneys general investigated whether he had pressured a Palmyra councilman to fire a city solicitor, Ted Rosenberg, who wasn’t cooperating with the machine. Wiretaps offered a rare glimpse of a man completely convinced of his power. “[Rosenberg] is history and he is done, and anything I can do to crush his ass, I wanna do cause I think he’s just a, just an evil fuck,” Norcross said. In another conversation, referring to then-top Jersey Democrats, he declared, “I’m not going to tell you this to insult you, but in the end, the McGreeveys, the Corzines, they’re all going to be with me. Not because they like me, but because they have no choice.” While discussing plans to remove a rival, he exclaimed: “Make him a fucking judge, and get rid of him!”
In February 2003, Norcross met Christie for a steak dinner at Panico’s in New Brunswick. It was, to put it mildly, highly unorthodox for a U.S. attorney to sit down with a political boss who was the subject of state and SEC attention. But Christie brushed off the criticisms. “I’m very careful with who I would go out with,” he said. “If I’m looking at somebody, I’d try to stay away from them.” That, to the skeptics, was just the issue. His corruption squad was scrutinizing dozens of lower-profile figures, all the way down to an Asbury Park councilman charged for getting his driveway paved for free. Why wasn’t he looking at Norcross? And didn’t he realize that he might have to in future? Sure enough, the following year the state attorney general referred the Palmyra case to Christie’s office. Two years later, Christie issued a scathing six-page letter announcing that he would not bring any charges against Norcross. It was a remarkable document. Not only did Christie openly declare a controversial figure to be home free, but he accused the state prosecutors of bungling the case so badly that they may have been shielding Norcross. “The allegation of some bad motive on the part of the state prosecutors is very unusual,” says Andrew Lourie, a former chief of the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice. High-ranking legal sources in the state view the letter as the ultimate Machiavellian maneuver. They agree that there may not have been a strong case to bring against Norcross in the Palmyra case after so much time had lapsed. But by publicly accusing his state counterparts of protecting Norcross, Christie was inoculating himself against accusations of favoritism. One of the former attorneys general who’d handled the case, John Farmer, who went on to become senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission and is now dean of Rutgers Law School, told me: “The statements and insinuations contained in that letter were, as I said at the time, utter nonsense. The passage of time has only magnified their essential absurdity.” Norcross may have been the most formidable player to escape Christie’s net, but he wasn’t the only one. Another was Brian Stack, a state legislator and Union City mayor who exemplifies a Jersey tradition Christie had long railed against: holding paid elected office at both the state and local levels. Stack maintains his constituents’ loyalty with acts of largesse such as doling out 15,000 free turkeys at Thanksgiving. He is rewarded with Soviet-style vote totals. (His slate won 92 percent in 2010.) In 2007, Christie conducted a massive investigation into legislative earmarks. It found that Stack had secured $200,000 in state grants that benefited a day-care center run by his then-wife. Charges were brought against other legislators for directing money to entities in which they held a personal interest, but not Stack. There was also Joe DiVincenzo Jr., lumbering and gregarious, the protégé of legendary Newark community leader Steve Adubato Sr. In 2002, “Joe D.” ran to replace Treffinger as executive of Essex County, the largest source of Democratic votes in the state. Rumors raged that he, too, was under investigation, for conflicts between his freeholder duties and his job (one of four he held at the time) at a produce company with a county contract. Then, right in the heat of the primary, Christie released a statement denying that Joe D. was under investigation. “It was totally unprecedented. I’ve never seen that done by a sitting U.S. attorney,” said DiVincenzo’s opponent, now-Assemblyman Tom Giblin. “Trying to get a letter out of the U.S. attorney’s office is usually like pulling a wisdom tooth.” After Joe D. took office, he invited Christie to give county workers a symposium on ethics. Finally, there was Glenn Paulsen of Burlington County, who had become the most powerful Republican power broker in the state in part because of his symbiotic détente with Norcross. Norcross got a lot of business for his insurance firm in Burlington County, while Paulsen’s law firm got plenty of municipal work in Norcross territory. In 2006, Christie’s office secured a guilty plea from a Republican operative, Robert Stears, for hugely overbilling several million dollars of lobbying work for the Burlington County Bridge Commission. According to one person with knowledge of the matter, it seemed likely that more revelations would follow and that an investigation of the commission’s spending could draw in Paulsen, and perhaps even Norcross. Stears, according to Christie’s announcement, was cooperating with an “ongoing criminal investigation.” In court, he explained that he had been “sucked into a corrupt group of people” and that he had been directed how much to bill the commission and how much to donate to the county Republican Party, which had been led by Paulsen. “Everyone was waiting for the second shoe to drop,” David Von Savage, the former GOP chairman in Cape May County, told me. It never did. “Chris essentially dumped that investigation-- he absolutely dumped it,” says one lawyer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. “As a favor to these guys, he tanked the investigation completely.”
By taking down some of the state’s bosses while leaving others off-limits, Christie had effectively turned the supposedly apolitical role of prosecutor into that of kingmaker. It was a brilliant strategy. New Jersey offered such a target-rich environment that Christie was able to get credit for taking down a slew of crooked officials and build alliances with some of the most powerful bosses in the state at the same time. Christie’s allies insist that he wasn’t playing favorites. “I can’t imagine Christie would suggest in any way, ‘I want you to lay off of this guy or go after this guy.’ It’s inconceivable to me,” says Ed Stier, a former federal and state prosecutor. Still, by the end of his tenure, Christie began showing up to administer the swearing-in ceremonies of town officials who were replacing the ones he’d pursued. No one could recall a prosecutor doing so, says one longtime Jersey hand: “It was like he was giving them his blessing.” ...[R]ight from the outset, Christie was working as closely with the machine as any recent governor. Well before his election, the Democratic bosses had met at the U.S. Open in Queens to divvy up the leadership spoils. Sheila Oliver, who worked under Joe D. in Essex County, would become the speaker of the Assembly. Sweeney would get the Senate presidency. Sweeney was a union man-- an ironworker-- but he was a Norcross man first and foremost. When it came time for the vote on Christie’s proposal to cut public-employee pensions and health benefits, Sweeney delivered the numbers. It was a coup for Christie-- national pundits hailed him as a politician more interested in getting results than scoring partisan points. In hindsight, what is notable is how openly Christie embraced the bosses. He sent massive resources in their direction; when they came under fire, he vouched for them. In early 2011, it emerged that Stack’s wife, now estranged, had been allowed to use city SUVs for personal use and fill up for free at the city’s natural gas pumps. Christie defended him: “I have no reason to question Brian Stack’s integrity.” (Stack returned the compliment, calling Christie “the greatest governor the state has ever had.”) On paper, Union City embodies the kind of waste that Christie has vowed to eliminate-- it paid its police chief a handsome $248,000 in 2011 and provides health benefits to part-time elected officials. And yet it has been showered with cash from Trenton-- about $12 million per year in discretionary “transitional aid.” Christie’s bond with DiVincenzo was just as overt. Corzine’s attorney general had led an investigation into voter fraud by election workers in Essex County, after reams of absentee ballots were filled out to benefit Joe D.-approved candidates. Following Christie’s election, the case was quickly wrapped up with a handful of light sentences for low-level workers. During his term, Essex County has been deluged with millions for big capital projects. The relationship has thrived despite 2012 revelations by the Star-Ledger that Joe D., who makes $153,000 per year on top of a $68,000 pension for the same job (via a legal loophole), has claimed an astonishing list of reimbursements from his campaign funds for personal expenses, such as a trip to Puerto Rico and more than 100 meals over the course of three months. In 2011, Christie observed that Joe D. had been with him “right from day one.” As for George Norcross, he is more powerful than ever. “It’s not just South Jersey anymore. Now it’s way beyond that,” says the longtime Jersey hand. Christie consented to Norcross’s pick to lead the patronage goldmine that is the Delaware River Port Authority.* The following year, the authority gave a $6 million grant to a cancer center at Norcross’s Cooper University Hospital. Next, Christie pushed through a controversial measure that granted Norcross his desired merger between Rutgers-Camden and nearby Rowan University.2 The result was a well-funded university that will further expand the Norcross empire—boosting beleaguered Camden, yes, but also putting even more jobs, money, and development projects at his disposal. (A former Navy SEAL attending Rutgers-Camden challenged the merger at a town-hall meeting. As he was escorted out by police, Christie hollered after him: “After you graduate from law school, you conduct yourself like that in a courtroom, your rear end is going to be thrown in jail, idiot!”) ...In early 2013, as Christie’s reelection neared, the operation kicked into overdrive. Christie was fixated on securing Democratic endorsements to bolster his image as a Republican with crossover appeal. It didn’t matter that he was expected to waltz back into office—people needed to get on the list. The administration’s intergovernmental-affairs staff, who knew which mayor or county official had gotten which grant, was moved almost wholesale to the campaign. Christie himself made repeated calls to mere county-level officers: clerks, sheriffs, registers of deeds. For those who got behind the governor, there were incentives. To give but one example: The close-knit Orthodox community in Lakewood had endorsed Corzine in 2009. In March, a coalition of the town’s rabbis and businessmen announced it would be backing Christie this time around. Two months later, the state granted $10.6 million in building funds to an Orthodox rabbinical school in Lakewood, one of the largest expenditures for any private college in the state. (The yeshiva was not exactly cash-strapped: A copy of its application I obtained noted that its endowment “far exceeded” the $1.84 million it was expected to contribute to the project.)
As Election Day neared, you could be forgiven for mistaking Christie for a Democrat. State Republicans were frozen out; candidates were told not to include his name or picture on their literature. “We didn’t get the support,” says George Wagoner, a losing Assembly candidate. Meanwhile, the weight of the Democratic machine swung behind the Republican governor. More than 50 Democratic elected officials endorsed Christie, including Brian Stack (who was hit with a $68,725 fine in July for failing to properly disclose campaign spending) and Joe D. (who also has a large fine looming). In photos and media appearances, Christie kept showing up smiling alongside Sweeney and other prominent Democrats. Norcross didn’t formally endorse Christie, but he made his approval clear. At one event, Norcross said he’d recently seen a man in a “Chris Christie: too big to fail” t-shirt. He told Christie: “You’re not too big to fail-- you’re too good and too important to fail us.” Meanwhile, Barbara Buono, the state senator who had volunteered to challenge Christie when more prominent Democrats, such as Cory Booker, declined, was unable to raise anywhere near enough money for a credible campaign. Numerous Democratic donors refused to give above the $300 threshold where their names would be disclosed, fearing Christie’s retribution. “I’d say to people, ‘What is going on?’” Buono recalls. “This is an election, not a military junta.” She attended one campaign rally in a North Jersey church, at which Sheila Oliver, once a reliable ally of the bosses, railed against unnamed powerful people who were supporting Christie only because he had a “dossier” on them. A month before the election, a picture surfaced on Twitter of Christie and Norcross, arm in arm at a Cowboys-Eagles game in Philadelphia. “I didn’t think [Norcross] would embrace me,” says Buono. “But I didn’t think he’d work directly against me.” In the end, Christie won by 22 points and Republicans gained not a single seat in the state Senate. And now we come to the national uproar over the mother of all traffic jams in Fort Lee. Christie has denied any knowledge of the ruse. But it has become increasingly hard to credit his ignorance, given how deeply involved he had been in his team’s political outreach to local officials, not to mention that the names of many of his closest aides were surfacing in communications about the closures. Among national Republicans, even some of Christie’s most vocal backers have started to waver. One Republican strategist told me: “No one’s rushing out there to defend him, because they don’t know where this could go next.” The Democratic bosses, though, are standing by their man. Norcross declared that, instead of obsessing over the bridge, national Democrats should be “pretty concerned about circumstances involving the implementation of Obamacare right now.” Joe D. struck a blasé tone: “Every place I go, people say, ‘What do I care? Why are we talking about it?’ ” And Brian Stack blasted the claim that Christie had threatened to withhold Sandy aid from Hoboken as “far-fetched.” “My relationship with the governor and his staff and this administration has been one of the best,” Stack said-- as if that wasn’t part of the problem.
What Bridgegate has laid bare is the skill and audacity with which Christie constructed his public image. “It’s almost like people were in a trance,” Buono told me. Christie may have been misunderstood for so long because his transactionalism diverted from the standard New Jersey model. He wasn’t out to line his own pockets, or build a business empire. He wasn’t even seeking to advance a partisan agenda. And yet it was transactionalism all the same. Christie used a corrupt system to expand his own power and burnish his own image, and he did it so artfully that he nearly came within striking distance of the White House. When he got cozy with Democratic bosses, people only saw a man willing to work across the aisle. When he bullied his opponents, they only saw a truth-teller. It was one of the most effective optical illusions in American politics-- until it wasn’t.
Good thing Christie has all those friends inside the corrupt Democratic establishment and the criminal machines that are so intent on making sure Hillary can count on New Jersey to keep Bernie at bay. After all, after Christie's endorsement of Trump, his ties inside the GOP establishment are... very frayed. Yesterday the New York Times heavy-duty reporting trio of Alexander Burns, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin explained the fumbling efforts of the GOP establishment to stop Herr Trumpf. On Feb. 19 Rove was insisting to GOP fatcats that a Trumpf nomination "would be catastrophic, dooming the party in November" and that it is not inevitable and can be stopped. The next day Maine's Paul Le Pen "erupted in frustration over the state of the 2016 race, saying Mr. Trump’s nomination would deeply wound the Republican Party. Mr. LePage urged the governors to draft an open letter 'to the people,' disavowing Mr. Trump and his divisive brand of politics. [A week later he endorsed Trump.]
Efforts to unite warring candidates behind one failed spectacularly: An overture from Senator Marco Rubio to Mr. Christie angered and insulted the governor. An unsubtle appeal from Mitt Romney to John Kasich, about the party’s need to consolidate behind one rival to Mr. Trump, fell on deaf ears. At least two campaigns have drafted plans to overtake Mr. Trump in a brokered convention, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has laid out a plan that would have lawmakers break with Mr. Trump explicitly in a general election. Despite all the forces arrayed against Mr. Trump, the interviews show, the party has been gripped by a nearly incapacitating leadership vacuum and a paralytic sense of indecision and despair, as he has won smashing victories in South Carolina and Nevada. Donors have dreaded the consequences of clashing with Mr. Trump directly. Elected officials have balked at attacking him out of concern that they might unintentionally fuel his populist revolt. And Republicans have lacked someone from outside the presidential race who could help set the terms of debate from afar. The endorsement by Mr. Christie, a not unblemished but still highly regarded figure within the party’s elite-- he is a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association-- landed Friday with crippling force. It was by far the most important defection to Mr. Trump’s insurgency: Mr. Christie may give cover to other Republicans tempted to join Mr. Trump rather than trying to beat him. Not just the Stop Trump forces seemed in peril, but also the traditional party establishment itself. Should Mr. Trump clinch the presidential nomination, it would represent a rout of historic proportions for the institutional Republican Party, and could set off an internal rift unseen in either party for a half-century, since white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party en masse during the civil rights movement. ...While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches. He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.
Oddly-- hypocritically-- Republicans can't bring guns into the July convention, but I'm hearing more and more about people looking into nitroglycerine. This year there's a better way to strike at The Machine than at a GOP convention. Help Alex Law defeat Norcross' corrupt little brother Donald in South Jersey. You can do it here.
UPDATE: More Christie Baggage The defunct Christie campaign's Finance Chair, Meg Whitman called Christie's endorsement of Herr Trumpf "an astonishing display of political opportunism." Her full statement:
Chris Christie's endorsement of Donald Trump is an astonishing display of political opportunism. Donald Trump is unfit to be President. He is a dishonest demagogue who plays to our worst fears. Trump would take America on a dangerous journey. Christie knows all that and indicated as much many times publicly. The Governor is mistaken if he believes he can now count on my support, and I call on Christie's donors and supporters to reject the Governor and Donald Trump outright. I believe they will. For some of us, principle and country still matter.
