Is It Really Possible That History Will Judge Mitch McConnell More Harshly Than Trump?

Yesterday, The Nation published a piece by Jeet Heer, Mitch McConnell Is Even Worse Than Trump, which notes that both are now basically AWOL is the pandemic crisis. While Trump spends his days "stirring up culture-war controversies with the media and Democrats as a way to move the discussion beyond the pandemic and the economic crisis. A distraction strategy makes sense because Trump has effectively given up on crafting any serious policy response to the pandemic. As Greg Sargent of the Washington Post notes, 'Trump’s war on reality has veered into a new place. Trump is responding to our most dire public health and economic crises in modern times with a concerted, far-reaching effort to concoct the mirage that we’re racing past both. The signs of this,' Sargent observes, 'are everywhere: in a new federal testing blueprint that largely casts responsibility on the states. In Trump’s new rage-tweets at the North Carolina governor over whether a full convention will be held under coronavirus conditions. And in demands for liability protections for companies so sickened workers can’t sue.'Trump’s response to the pandemic, now that the first wave has peaked and is perhaps beginning a slow decline, is to ride it out. He is going to do as much as he can to pretend that it is all but over and to distance himself from any responsibility for the continuing deaths."

Trump has in effect gone AWOL. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has been equally derelict, taking repeated breaks from Washington and focusing his energies more on filling court vacancies than crafting a policy response to the pandemic. In mid-March, the hashtag #WheresMitch gained currency because he recessed the Senate to return to his home state of Kentucky to celebrate the elevation of a protégé, Justin Walker, to the federal bench.

Last Friday, the Senate started another recess, this one lasting three weeks. That leaves the $3 trillion relief package that the House has passed in a limbo, awaiting McConnell’s return for negotiations to even start deliberating about any Senate revisions. McConnell’s decision to delay the relief package comes at a time when unemployment rates are about to approach 20 percent, a catastrophic level not seen since the Great Depression. Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell warns that the recession could last until the end of 2021.

Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are often treated like an odd couple, a pair of opposites who have been forced together. Trump is the loud outsider who has no real understanding of how government works. McConnell is the low-key consummate insider, skilled at gaming the system through backroom deals.

Jane Mayer’s in-depth profile of the Kentucky senator in the New Yorker quotes many Washington observers who draw a contrast between the two men. One former Trump administration official told Mayer, “It would be hard to find two people less alike in temperament in the political arena. With Trump, there’s rarely an unspoken thought. McConnell is the opposite-- he’s constantly thinking but says as little as possible.” The official added, “Trump is about winning the day, or even the hour. McConnell plays the long game. He’s sensitive to the political realities. His North Star is continuing as Majority Leader-- it’s really the only thing for him. He’s patient, sly, and will obfuscate to make less apparent the ways he’s moving toward a goal.”

But as Mayer makes clear, McConnell’s single-minded focus on keeping his position as majority leader aligns him in a deep way with Trump, despite their superficial dissimilarities. Both Trump and McConnell are nihilists, eager above all to hold on to power and to serve the wealthy donors of the Republican Party. Mayer quotes John David Dyche, a conservative lawyer in Louisville who had been a McConnell admirer until recently and wrote an admiring biography of him. According to Dyche, McConnell “of course realizes that Trump is a hideous human being and utterly unfit to be president” but doesn’t do anything about it because the senator has “no ideology except his own political power.”

Far from being an odd couple, Trump and McConnell are a perfectly paired duo. They work well together as a grifter team. Trump is the clown who grabs all the attention, while McConnell picks the pockets of the distracted crowd.

As grotesque as Trump is, McConnell is worse. McConnell has been around longer and has helped create the conditions that made Trump’s rise possible. McConnell’s obstruction during the Obama years, including blocking the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland, contributed to the demoralization of the Democratic base and the larger feeling in America that Washington is hopelessly gridlocked. In 2016 Trump skillfully exploited the anxiousness created by gridlock and sold himself as the outsider who can fix it.

Democrats are eager to defeat Trump in the fall election. But they should bear in mind that McConnell is the bigger villain. The goal should be to make sure McConnell loses his position as majority leader. Even sweeter would be if he were ejected from his seat.

Charles Booker resigned from his state Rep job to run full-time against McConnell. This morning he told me that "The reality is that Mitch McConnell controls so much of what happens in Washington. As reckless and dangerous as Trump is, it is Mitch McConnell’s absolute abandonment of his oath, our constitution, and our lives that has allowed Trump to balloon our deficit, uproot our progress on the world stage, and willfully ignore the chances to lead in the face of COVID-19. Donald Trump is an idiot, but Mitch McConnell is intentional. There is no progress for our country that includes him remaining in office. That is why I am building a movement of fed up and fired up Kentuckians to beat him."

The other progressive in the Kentucky Democratic primary is Mike Broihier, who has been endorsed by Marianne Williamson, This morning, Mike told us that "It was the slow realization that Trump was a symptom and McConnell the disease that pulled me into the fight to rid the Republic of him. In rare moments of honesty McConnell himself will tip his hand and tell us he is, '...changing America for ever,' with his agenda of, 'Judges, judges, judges.' The smoke and noise from the daily dumpster fire at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is perfect cover for him packing the federal bench with unqualified, ideologically driven judges with lifetime appointments. Judges that are hostile to women, hostile to racial minorities, hostile to LGBTQ persons, hostile to labor and hostile to immigrants. Long after Trump is gone and long after McConnell is gone generations of Americans will be dealing with the fallout of this tactic."

Worst President Ever + Worse Senate Majority Leader Ever = Bad Pandemic

The lede picture for Neil Irwin's chilling NY Times essay-- How Bailout Backlash and Moral Hazard Outrage Could Endanger the Economy wasn't of Trump or Mnuchin; it was a silhouette of a chinless, bespectacled turtle with this caption "Mitch McConnell at the U.S. Capitol. He opposes federal bailouts of Democratic-leaning states with large public employee pension obligations." Irwin wrote that the economy is "in free fall, with tens of millions of people unemployed and countless businesses at risk of collapse" but that almost instantly "the political conversation has pivoted from whatever-it-takes determination toward a different feeling: outrage." Austeritarian conservatives are increasingly "focused not on preventing a potential depression, but on litigating which recipients of federal rescue are morally worthy and which are not." Republicans are adamantly opposed to-- and angered by-- "federal government support for state and local governments, and at expanded unemployment insurance benefits supporting the jobless."

In Bush's 2008 global financial crisis, the same worthless sacks of senatorial shit-- Irwin described them differently because it's The Times-- bitched and whined "about mortgage relief for home buyers who had borrowed more than they could afford-- a televised rant about one such program helped spawn the Tea Party movement."

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, raised the possibility in an April interview that states that found themselves short of cash should be able to allowed to go bankrupt. Though he later backed away from that position, he and other Republicans have made clear they don’t want Democratic-leaning states with large public employee pension obligations to be bailed out with federal money.

States are uniformly facing collapsing revenue because of the pandemic, raising the prospect that even those with sound pre-crisis finances will have to make deep cuts in the coming years. This could hold the economy back even once the private sector rebounds.

The Paycheck Protection Program, the government’s signature effort to pump money to smaller businesses that agree to keep their employees on staff, has proceeded amid recriminations over whether businesses are truly worthy if they have access to funding elsewhere.

Part of the problem was Congress’s decision to initially fund the program with $350 billion, far below the needs of smaller businesses looking to cover their payrolls, and to expand it in a second round. The limited availability of money created an atmosphere of scarcity in which any business that gets aid-- including large restaurant chains like Shake Shack and Ruth’s Chris Steak House, and firms with venture-capital funding-- does so at the cost of another firm that might seem more worthy.

“The fact that there is more outrage over one bad business getting a P.P.P. loan than 100,000 companies deserving one but not getting one because of the anemic funding is ludicrous,” Mr. Lettieri said. “People have been chasing the shiny object of ‘who is most deserving, who isn’t, and where do you fall on the spectrum of need,’ which is a completely misguided way to approach this.”

The pandemic has no moral logic of its own. The steps that are most likely to revive the economy don’t depend on some abstract notion of what is fair. And outrage that some group you don’t like received help probably won’t make things better.

Mike Broihier, one of the progressives trying to defeat McConnell, told us last night that "Not surprisingly, McConnell's pitch to allow states to go bankrupt was couched as a Red State/Blue State conflict. Constantly appealing to what he believes are the worst angels of his fellow Kentuckians, McConnell wrongly bets that all evidence that blue states are net tax payers and red states, Kentucky among them, are net tax takers, will be ignored. This crass, classist appeal will only work with the Commonwealth's dimmest bulbs.  Fortunately, McConnell's visits to the Bluegrass State are so infrequent and brief that he doesn't realize he's played this trick too many times. Loathsome and unmissed ex-governor, Matt Bevin, tried this crap in 2019 and was send packing by teachers, grassroots organizers and, well, right thinking Kentuckians."

Early yesterday morning-- as it was announced that the U.S. was about to pass the 70,000 deaths milestone-- Trump was playing on his Twitter account, boasting about his "great reviews... for how well we are handling the pandemic." It almost made me feel sorry for whichever White House stooge is tasked with finding news clips to tickle his ego every morning.

As for McConnell, he's still polling as the most hated U.S. Senator and is increasingly vulnerable to go down the electoral tubes the same way Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin did last year when Democrat Andy Beshear beat him by just over 5,000 votes in a shocking repudiation of Trumpism. It's ironic that Beshear's hate line against the pandemic-- certainly at odds with what Bevin would have done-- is keeping the pandemic at bay in Kentucky. Other Trump extremist governors-- in effect, Bevin dopplegängers-- have catastrophic through-the-roof rates of infection:

• Pete Ricketts (R-NE)- 3,103 per million
• Eric Holcomb (R-IN)- 3,090 per million
• Kristi Noem (R-SD)- 3,087
• Kim Reynolds (R-IA)- 3,098 per million
• Brian Kemp (R-GA)- 2,850 per million
• Tate Reeves (R-MS)- 2,636 per million
• Bill Lee (R-TN)- 2,040 per million
• Ron DeSantis (R-FL)- 1,791 per million

Thanks to Beshear's relatively hard line, Kentucky's rate is just 1,155 infections per million, below the national average and a more manageable pandemic in McConnell's home state, despite McConnell and his party's approach.

Can America Evolve Towards A Country With A Humanitarian Bottom Line Rather Than Just A Financial Bottom Line?

I was on the phone with Marianne Williamson this morning and she was talking to me about how we have to change our country's priorities and the need to go from an economic bottom line to a humanitarian bottom line. During her presidential campaign she said that "The first pillar of a season of moral repair has to do with economic justice-- has to do with recognizing that we have created a wealth inequality greater than anytime since 1929, we have decimated America's middle class, and we must take immediate action to fix this. We should repeal the 2017 $2 trillion tax cut, which gave 83 cents of every dollar to the very richest individuals and corporations; although, we should put back in the middle class tax cut."

She went on to advocate specific programs:

We should stop all the corporate subsidies, such as $26 billion that we gave to oil and gas alone last year. For what reason?

We also need to make the United States government able to negotiate with huge pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices. The US government cannot negotiate for lower drug prices, even though we have people in the United States even today who are dying because they cannot afford their insulin.

‍We should also say to those who have a billion dollars in assets that 3 percent tax on those assets is reasonable and 2 percent for those who have over $50 million-- that is reasonable as well.

As she said, "We have near 93 million people who live near poverty in the United States today. That means million upon millions of people, tens of millions of people who live, every single day, in chronic tension and economic anxiety, not knowing really what will happen if they get sick, not knowing what will happen if one of their children get sick, not knowing how they will send their children to college or not knowing how they themselves will get out from under the burden of their college loan. We need to change this. Bad public policy created all this and good public policy will make it right."





After Marianne ended her presidential campaign she decided to do what she could to help progressive congressional candidates who are running on platforms that she feels are about creating that good and reparative public policy. You may have noticed that this week centrist Democrat Amy Klobuchar, a top contender to be Biden's VP pick, followed Marianne's lead and announced that she is trying to help down-ballot candidates, what Politico referred to as kicking off her next act. The effort to raise funds, the snazzily dubbed "Win Big Project," began Friday by endorsing a slate of a dozen House and Senate candidates. All of them are centrists or candidates from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, like reactionary Blue Dogs Anthony Brindisi (D-NY) and Xochitl Torres Small (D-NM).

Klobuchar's are the kinds of candidates who have worked hand-in-hand with the Republicans to create the bad public policy Marianne has steadfastly derailed. And none of Klobuchar's endorsed candidates are anything like the dedicated progressives Marianne is helping raise funds for-- the list of which you can see by clicking on the thermometer on the right. I asked several of those candidates what makes their own campaigns different from the campaigns of conservative Democrats being supported by the corporate and political establishment.

The first response was from Liam O'Mara, a progressive congressional candidate in Riverside County who won his primary and is challenging right-wing crook and Trump enabler Ken Calvert. "Marianne is right to say that we need a moral renaissance in this country," he said. "All our great religious and philosophical traditions give us a sense of right and wrong which is rooted in justice and compassion for others. None of them could be used to justify the neofeudal outcome of Republican tax policy. The GOP claims the mantle of liberty while it strips that liberty from Americans by steadily lowering our living standards and reducing us to virtual paupers, dependent on the largesse of powerful special interests and the billionaire class. Americans should not have to live on their knees, begging for crumbs from the table of the super-rich. Our Founders fought a revolution motivated by the Enlightenment ideal that all human beings were born free and equal in dignity and rights. It is well past time we realised the promise of that revolution, and of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is also the law of the land."

Mark Gamba's all-mail primary is 2 weeks from Tuesday. He told us he couldn’t agree more with Marianne on this. "I have long advocated that we should measure America’s success on a Gross National Happiness Index rather then the GDP which only measures outcomes for the wealthiest and has little relevance to the rest of us and certainly doesn’t measure economic justice. Concepts like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal which look to invest in the vast majority of people and the health of the nation, rather than the wealth of the 1% are exactly what we need to enact to bring our country out of the economic tragedy millions are suffering due to the pandemic. It will require a significant change in Congress however to make that a reality. The neo-liberals will use this crisis to further their agenda of concentrating wealth and power at the top. Everyone below the top 10% have been getting poorer, relative to the cost of living, since the Reagan era. It is critical that we raise the minimum wage to a living wage and tie it to the cost of housing so that it never stagnates again. It is beyond time to tax capital gains at the same rate we tax other income; to increase the tax rate on anyone making more than $10 million a year to at least 50% and to close the loopholes that allow companies like Amazon to pay nothing in taxes while creating another instant billionaire who treats his employees poorly. According to The Guardian: 'Some of the richest people in the U.S. (Bezos in particular) have been at the front of the queue as the government has handed out trillions of dollars to prop up an economy it shuttered amid the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the billionaire class has added $308 billion to its wealth in four weeks-- even as a record 26 million people lost their jobs.' This is why all the candidates in this post need the support of every American who hopes for progressive change, I for one do not take a penny of corporate money so that I can be free to fight for the changes Marianne and I have outlined."

Julie Oliver is the progressive Democrat running against a Trumpist crook in central Texas, Roger Williams. "Our economy was already in a slow-motion crisis that the coronavirus has hit the fast-forward button on so we must rebuild that economy to ensure that it prioritizes people first," she told me. "Rebuilding the American economy for the long term is going to take a massive WWII-style mobilization. We need to repeal the GOP tax cuts for multinational corporations, tax the rich and corporations, and invest in world-class, high quality healthcare, education, and clean energy infrastructure."

"As a country we need courageous leaders who can't be bought and who will put people first, not corporate interests. Marianne, wrote Arizona progressive Eva Putzova, "has been such a leader, which is evident from her dedication to help elect a brand-new Congress. Poverty in the United States is deep and widespread. People are living paycheck to paycheck, always one crisis away from a total financial collapse. In my congressional district, it is impossible to not focus on the tragic consequences of our government’s official policies of the past toward Native Americans: first policies of annihilation, then displacement and assimilation. To this day we treat Native lands as a national sacrifice area by enabling resource extraction that comes with environmental degradation and water contamination and neglect to invest in basic infrastructure that would be unacceptable elsewhere. We are talking about running water and paved roads. Our priorities must shift and this is why I’m challenging the incumbent whose timid leadership fails to address the greatest challenges of our times and to uplift the most vulnerable among us."

Tomas Ramos, the best of the candidates to to represent the open South Bronx seat that Jose Serrano is giving up, reminded us that "It's easy to blame Trump for the economic crisis that we're in but these series of events unfolded in the 1980s under Reagan. There was a redistribution of income from the have-nots to the haves. The Bush II administration made some enhancements, and under Tump we're continuing to see a redistribution of American capitalism, which has exhausted its ability to reproduce itself through tax cuts. The trickle down analogy is a farce, because all it did was the opposite, it manipulated the effect of wealth which rose to the top 0.1 percent. When Reagan applied this tax cut policy, the American economy was operating with the premise of global profits and surpluses. This helped fuel the demand for international exports, ultimately these surpluses helped spur on subsets such as the derivative economy. After 2008 recession it was clear that the American economy can no longer support these subsets economies. If these catastrophic economic policies continue, then it will further stagnate the incomes of the middle class and the working class. The COVID-19 crisis is a clear indication that we must reinvest in the human capital and not the on the future value of an economic indicator."

Michael Broihier is a progressive Democrat Marianne has endorsed for the Kentucky Senate seat held by Mitch McConnell. Mike told me that "Marianne is spot on; the great tragedy of this pandemic, after the loss of life, will be a rush back to the comfort of business as usual. As a farmer, I know how little a roaring stock market means to rural voters. In a state with the nation’s fifth worst economy and double the national average of people working at the minimum wage, the health of the Dow-Jones or S&P means little. And, the failure of a health care system tied to employment is self-evident when 30-million Americans become unemployed in a manner of weeks." He elaborated:

Sadly, those people who routinely had to chose between rationing their prescriptions or paying the rent were invisible to career politicians of both parties until Washington career politicians began to fear the Senate gym being looted for hand-sanitizer and toilet paper. But even with a mounting death toll their first instinct was to bail out their rich and corporate donors and that tone deafness is not lost on working America. Even the paltry, one-time payment to citizens smacks of desperation-- not leadership-- as they fail to grasp the enormity of the challenges ahead.

In my race, I face the DNC’s handpicked candidate, who has refashioned herself as a pro-Trump moderate who thinks the Senate Majority Leader is stopping the president from draining the swamp. A candidate who said she would have voted to elevate Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. This is what Washington establishment Dems think is what is needed-- another a get-along Democrat absent of vision or the moral courage to lead the country towards a more just and equitable future.

Queens progressive Shan Chowdhury is exactly the kind of young, working class leader who would make Congress a vehicle for the aspirations of American families rather than for sleazy corporate interests. This morning he said that "My race is critical in having to choose what is economically feasible vs. what moral is morally feasible. My opponent, Gregory Meeks is a corrupt corporate Democrat from the Republican wing of the party. He is the chair of subcommittee for House Financial Services of Consumer Protection and Financial Institutions. Time and time again since he’s even in office, he’s bailed out the big banks when working people needed help the most. I on the other hand, am fighting for progressive policies built on moral imperatives to protect working people from corporate harm. Homes and jobs should not be lost because of how irresponsible my opponent’s donors are with handling money."

Robin Wilt, a former Bernie DNC delegate, is fighting for a better Rochester and Monroe County. She and Marianne see eye to eye on shifting societal priorities and this morning shared that "Our campaign is all about elevating the voices of and empowering the 99%. For far too long, the establishment has cynically ignored anyone who wasn’t a corporate donor or political elite, and developed policies that cater to the interests of the monied few, as opposed to the interests of all of the people that they serve. As a result, our society was left vulnerable to collapse amid the current crisis. My opponent, as part of the neoliberal power structure in Albany for over thirty years, has not only been complicit, he has been an architect of these failed policies."

By contrast, the policy centerpieces and priorities of our campaign are those issues that have been far too long subverted by lickspittle corporate appeasers-- like my opponent-- who do not have the backbone to fight on behalf of the communities they represent: We proudly support healthcare and housing as human rights and champion Expanded and Improved Medicare for All, regardless of immigration status, and a Federal Homes Guarantee. We recognize that our existence on this planet is at grave risk and will fight for a Green New Deal that centers the communities that have been at the mercy of polluters and promises a future free from carbon dependence while bolstering our economy. We understand that everyone deserves a quality education, regardless of their zip code, and we support tripling Title I funding, tuition-free pre K- 16 public education, and eliminating student debt. We support a path toward citizenship for the millions of undocumented residents of our country, restoration of DACA, and economic justice for migrant and farm workers. We recognize that endless war, mass incarceration, and mass detention are all sustainable symptoms of our prison and military industrial complex, and will dismantle the systems that engender this injustice. We understand that there is an electoral industrial complex that disenfranchises our most vulnerable communities and will champion a new Voting Rights Act that ensures equal access to the ballot box, and we will remove money from politics by overturning Citizens United.

In short, we are running a people-centered campaign that recognizes that we are only as strong as our most vulnerable communities and that there is no moving forward when we continue to leave people behind.

Why Do Trump And The GOP Oppose Vote By Mail-- Even During A Deadly Pandemic?

That was a Tweet from Señor Trumpanzee yesterday. It would be paranoid to say he opposes vote by mail because the GOP has put so much effort into being able to rig electronic voting machines. But paranoia doesn't always mean you're wrong, does it? I asked some of the progressive candidates we've been talking with how they felt about Trump's attempts to vilify and block vote by mail proposals. I start with the two progressives in the Kentucky primary that will determine who takes on Trump's most repulsive enabler in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.

Charles Booker, endorsed by Blue America, was the first candidate to respond. "The Republican position against vote-by-mail-- even in the midst of this pandemic-- is galling," he told me. "To force people to choose between their health and exercising the right to vote is horrifying. But it isn't surprising. " But he went on from there:

I'm black, and I'm a Type 1 diabetic--- two groups of people who have been shown to be more likely to die from the coronavirus. Republican leaders who stand against vote-by-mail in this pandemic are telling me I have a choice: participate in our democracy, or drop dead.

In Kentucky, I have long fought for increased access to the ballot box by breaking down barriers to voting. I've sponsored legislation to automatically restore voting rights to people who have completed their sentences for felony convictions; I've supported our Governor as he has made that policy law with an executive order. And I've railed against Republican efforts to suppress the vote, most recently with a photo voter ID bill that our Governor vetoed just days ago. And I have called on our leaders in Washington to support states in implementing vote-by-mail for all 2020 elections.

When I was a little boy, my granddad told me about being forced to guess the number of beans in a jar before he was allowed to vote. That was 30 years ago. I spent a lot of my adult life thinking things had gotten better, and that such blatant voter suppression was in America's past. Now, in 2020, I know better, as the President and Republicans across the country tell people like me that we can vote, but we might die. Our choice.

Moments later, Mike Broihier, who was endorsed by Marianne Williamson yesterday, weighed in as well. Like Charles, Kentucky Democrats know how fast and loose McConnell's GOP plays with election security. "I used to agree with the saying that Democracy isn't a suicide pact, but seeing the lines of Wisconsin voters sent out  en masse during the pandemic by conservative state and US Supreme courts makes me wonder. The right's vision of voter suppression as a path to success was later made clearer in a presidential tweet, when, as usual, President Trump was unable to focus on a single message, even for 280 characters. If he'd just stuck with the canard that mail-in voting is rife with fraud-- it isn't-- he might have successfully dog-whistled his base. But he had to add "...and for whatever reason, (it)doesn't work out well for Republicans. Exactly, if you don't suppress the vote and disenfranchise people the arc of history bends more quickly towards justice and that is what entrenched politicians fear. Trump even previewed this thinking last week, speaking about the House COVID19 relief bill, saying, 'They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.' The take away, for me, is that this is the time to double down on voter registration efforts and grassroots turn-out-the-vote operations. Here in Kentucky in 2019 the work of Indivisible and other organizations flipped several solid red counties and moved the needle far enough to eject a cretinous Republican governor. On the ground, from what I have seen in my campaign, those same people, having tasted their influence, are not resting on their laurels but are ready to continue the fight, mail in ballots or not."

I also spoke to several House candidates who still have primaries coming up against Republican-lite fake Democrats. Milwaukie Mayor Mark Gamba is running for the Oregon seat occupied by GOP-friendly Blue Dog Kurt Schrader. "It's amazing how easy it is to make Republicans afraid of a thing," he told me soon after Trump's tweet. "Now they are going to be afraid of the mail. What the wealthy puppet masters fear is an actual democracy, where the person who represents the actual people, the person with the better ideas, the person with the proven track record of causing positive change gets elected, rather than the person who has the most wealthy supporters. The great American experiment is collapsing under the weight of all of that wealth. We watched it play out this morning in the democratic primary, no thinking person can imagine that Joe Biden will make a better president, a better leader, a better inspirer to greatness than Bernie Sanders will.  But Joe will kowtow to the rich, Joe will maintain the status quo that is killing our democracy and our very future on this planet.  But he won't tax the rich, by god. He won't stop the fossil fuel industry from continuing this headlong suicide cult they have created and maintained. It is now more critical than ever that we replace every bad senator and congressperson we can with a thinking, progressive champion for the people and the planet."

Boston progressive Brianna Wu is running for a seat occupied by anti-healthcare reactionary Stephen Lynch. Today she asked "What is Trump talking about? The problem is, and continues to be, that even he doesn’t know. What 'voter fraud' is he speaking of? None. Of course he doesn’t support voting by mail. If more people were able to vote, he would lose, and he knows it. And more importantly, it’s sickening that he is more concerned with perpetuating lies for his own political purposes than coordinating a real federal response to COVID-19, which is killing thousands of Americans. We need voting by mail, and we need to save lives."

Tom Guild is running for the Oklahoma City seat occupied by another Blue Dog, Kendra Horn, who's even further right than Schrader. He told me that Senor Trumpanzee fights every battle "with a view towards what’s good for him, but not necessarily for most Americans. In the current national emergency, people may literally be risking their lives to go to the polls on election day, so it makes sense to have prudent alternatives, where ordinary Americans can both exercise the right to vote and also remain healthy and alive. Several states have relied mainly or exclusively on mailed ballots for some time now and have not only increased participation, but have had few, if any, reports of fraud or abuse. As in many areas of law and public policy, we may have to bring the current POTUS kicking and screaming into the current century. When it comes to the fundamental right to vote, while maintaining the health and safety of voters, mailed ballots are a promising way to protect and preserve both. Come on Mr. President, don’t lead from behind!"

Arizona progressive Eva Putzova is also taking on a reactionary Blue Dog, Tom O'Halleran, this one an "ex"-Republican legislator with a horrifying conservative record. O'Halleran may not recognize what a liar Trump is, but Eva sure does. "There is no voter fraud connected to mail-in ballots or in-person voting anywhere in the country," she told me, "and numerous studies show that. Trump, and his Republican enablers, want to suppress the vote generally, and with youth and people of color in particular. Trump himself said high levels of voting hurt Republicans. So, DEMOCRACY hurts Republicans according to the leader of the Republican Party. We need to carry on the fight to expand democracy and the right to vote at every level in this country. This is the fight of our lifetime. If we lose, and voting becomes a privilege rather than a right, we will live in a quasi-fascist society where rights are not inherent but accrue only to those favored few. I will oppose such an outcome with every breath in my body."

Queens progressive Shaniyat Chowdhury-- replying to Trump's lies-- summed it up for virtually all the candidates Blue America has endorsed: "Voter fraud is when you work with Cambridge Analytics to manipulate emotions of voters without their knowledge. He should know all about it. We should be able to vote without any suppression. It’s a guaranteed right but also a privilege that many tax paying Americans do not have."