An Electoral Strategy For Democratic Activists... But NOT For The Faint Of Heart

Rep. X is in this photo of Republicans pretending to be Democrats

I was invited to join a conference call yesterday with a group of committed activists in a red district with an ultra-right-wing Democratic congressmember, who I will refer to as X, so as not to give anything away I was asked to not write about yet. X, a freshman, immediately joined the Blue Dog and New Dems and has a ghastly (F) voting record already. X opposes everything progressive, period. The only case to be made for X is that X is better than a Republican-- in other words, the DCCC's very favorite strategy: vote for the lesser of two evils.

X is heavily supported by the county Democratic parties in the district, who are all just delighted to have someone on Team Blue in the house. The progressive activists I spoke with yesterday, on the other hand, are willing to see X defeated... by a Republican if necessary. One of them has all but decided to run as an independent and take on X and whichever garbage the NRCC fields, from the left, campaigning on the Green New Deal (which X opposes), Medicare-For-All (which X opposes), free public college (which X opposes), lower drug prices (which X opposes), etc. The idea is to show how similar X and the Republican are.

X won by less than 3% last time. It was very close and the Republican was lazy and arrogant and never even thought there was a chance of being defeated. This time the NRCC has targeted X and the Republicans will go all out in this district which Trump won by double-digits.

An independent candidate on the left isn't likely to win-- but is guaranteed to take away enough votes from X that the Republican will win. Inevitably local and state Democrats will beg the independent to get out of the race. When all else fails, Steny Hoyer will step in with a job offer. At that point, the independent will agree to drop out, not for the job, but in return for X publicly signing an agreement to fully support the Green New Deal and Medicare-For-All. X will be expected to do just what Ben Ray Luján did when he realized a progressive primary opponent was going to kick his ass-- co-sponsor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal resolution. The independent will drop out of the race and endorse X for reelection when X goes on TV and explains why Medicare-For-All is crucial and why Pramila Jayapal can count on X to voter it and fight for it.

If you read Paul Waldman's column in the Washington Post yesterday, "The Campaign To Destroy Medicare-For-All Has Already Begun," you know how angry X's fellow Blue Dogs are going to be. The Blue Dogs' corporately-funded think tank, Center Forward, is putting everything it has into defeating Medicare-For-All. "In fact," wrote Waldman, "they’ve already begun to put together what will no doubt be a spectacularly well-funded campaign to crush Medicare-for-all or any other ambitious reform that Democrats come up with."

Like us, he cited Lee Fang's Intercept exposé on Center Forward and the PhRMA lobbyists. "[I]t shows," he wrote, "how the groundwork is already being laid to defeat Medicare-For-All long before there’s a Democratic nominee with a proposal that he or she is promising to pursue, let alone legislation that stands a chance of becoming law. Now let’s take a moment to talk about the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future. If you go to their web site you can read their inspiring mission statement":

The Partnership for America’s Health Care Future’s (PAHCF) mission is to improve what’s working in health care and fix what’s not. We support building on the strength of employer-provided health coverage and preserving Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs that so many Americans depend on, so we can deliver affordability, expand options, improve access, and foster innovation.

Affordability, options, access, innovation-- all that sounds great! And you can watch this video the group produced, which for the first minute and a half seems like a friendly Vox explainer on how the American health insurance system works, but then takes a dark turn to to saying how Medicare-for-all will destroy everything good about health care, full of Republican talking points.

“Health care decisions would be shifted from patients and their doctors to politicians and bureaucrats,” it says, as opposed to the paradise we live in now, where insurance company bureaucrats have absolutely no role in health care decisions.

PAHCF, which was formed last year, is a coalition that includes pretty much every industry with a financial interest in keeping medical costs high and avoiding more government oversight: the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, the hospital industry, the biotech industry, and the American Medical Association, among others. If we were to actually bring down the prices that make American health care by far the most expensive in the world, they’d all suffer.

PAHCF is only getting started, by doing such things as placing op-eds; in March, Libby Watson wrote a revealing article for Splinter on how the “ordinary Americans" writing those op-eds and getting quoted on the partnership’s behalf all turn out to PR executives with insurance-company clients, people in the insurance industry, Republican officials, and the like. Scroll through its Twitter feed and you’ll see that it contains almost nothing about improving the health-care system; it’s virtually all attacks on Medicare-for-all.

If there’s a Democrat elected next year and health-care reform looks like a real possibility, they’ll kick their campaign of lobbying and public persuasion into high gear. They have essentially limitless resources; they could easily spend hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Medicare-for-all, given what they stand to lose.

That will be just one part of the anti-Medicare-for-all effort. It’s also important to understand that these interests are not just going to fight against a full-on single-payer system of the kind that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) advocates. They’ll fight just as hard against what I call “Medicare for anyone,” or plans that allow anyone to join a government program but don’t mandate it. In fact, they’ll fight against pretty much any serious expansion of the federal government’s role in health care, because it could all wind up in the same place: cutting their profits.

And the truth is they stand an excellent chance of winning that fight. This is a classic collective-action problem, as Mancur Olson explained half a century ago. You have a group of concentrated interests with a great deal to lose on one side, and a much larger group of diffuse interests on the other side. Many of the people in that group with diffuse interests-- that would be the American public-- have a lot to gain from a universal system, but they’re more difficult to organize than a small group of drug companies, insurers and doctors willing to pour millions upon millions of dollars into the effort.

They also have fear and loss aversion on their side as they set out to destroy Medicare-for-all, which is why they’re arguing that if Medicare-for-all passes, you’ll be left with nothing. And if you say, “They can’t say that, it’s transparently bogus,” you obviously weren’t around the last time we debated health reform.

Which is why the Obama administration decided in 2009 that the only way to pass the Affordable Care Act was not to fight those interests but to co-opt them, convincing them that there was enough in it for them in the ACA that they shouldn’t oppose it. And it worked.

Democrats haven’t yet figured out how they’re going to defeat the moneyed interests that will be working with Republican to fight the next version of health-care reform, and I wish I could say I knew exactly how to do it. But if those Democrats don’t come up with some kind of plan, they’re almost guaranteed to fail.

So... I'll do whatever I can to help the local activists force Rep. X see the light or... whatever. Saving X's miserable career isn't high on my agenda; saving Medicare-For-All from X's colleagues is. Not to mention the Green New Deal. If Rep. X is determined to vote like a Republican, X can expect to be treated like a Republican.

Democratic Voters Expect The House To Pass Medicare For All Before 2020... So Why All The Foot-Dragging?

Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman thinks the media Is badly botching the Medicare-For-All debate. He's correct. As background in how the media can screw tyhings up, he cited the Iraq War in 2003 and the way it gave just "minimal attention to Donald Trump’s spectacular history of personal corruption in 2016."

Fortunately, correcting the mistake is easy, if we’re willing to give a minute or two of thought to some rudimentary math and logic. I speak of the question of universal health coverage, particularly in the form of Medicare-for-all (in its multiple variations).

Before we proceed, there’s a number I want you to remember: $50 trillion. Keep that in the back of your head.

Right now, this debate is being framed in part as a disagreement between a bunch of Democrats peddling pie-in-the-sky notions on one side and more hardheaded and realistic critics (including but not limited to Republicans) asking the tough questions about affordability on the other. That framing is completely and utterly wrong, and even journalists of good faith are falling into its trap.

So for instance, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg says “I think we could never afford that” when asked about providing universal coverage. The government might provide coverage to the uninsured, he says, “But to replace the entire private system where companies provide health care for their employees would bankrupt us for a very long time.” Likewise, former Starbucks chief executive and potential presidential candidate Howard Schultz dismisses the idea, saying, “It’s unaffordable.”

The fact that these two highly successful businessmen-- whose understanding of investments, costs and benefits helped them become billionaires-- can say something so completely mistaken and even idiotic is a tribute to the human capacity to take our ideological biases and convince ourselves that they’re not biases at all but are instead inescapable rationality.

Let me explain. There are any number of reasons you might oppose universal coverage. I happen to think they don’t add up to much, but you can make a case. Maybe you just don’t think it’s government’s job to make sure people are covered. What you cannot say, however, is that a universal system is unaffordable.

That’s because there is one thing you absolutely, positively must do whenever you talk about the cost of a universal system-- and that journalists almost never do when they’re asking questions. You have to compare what a universal system would cost to what we’re paying now.



It isn’t easy to be perfectly precise about this, because there are multiple forms a universal system might take. But there have been some recent attempts to estimate what it would cost to implement, for instance, the single-payer system that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) advocates; one widely cited study, from a source not favorably inclined toward government solutions to complex problems, came up with a figure of $32.6 trillion over 10 years.

That’s a lot of money. But you can’t understand what it means until you realize that last year we spent about $3.5 trillion on health care, and under current projections, if we keep the system as it is now, we’ll spend $50 trillion over the next decade.

Again, you can criticize any particular universal plan on any number of grounds. But if it costs less than $50 trillion over 10 years-- which every universal plan does-- you can’t say it’s “unaffordable” or it would “bankrupt” us, because the truth is just the opposite.

I've made this analogy before, but it's as if you were heating your house by burning $100 bills in your fireplace, and I said, “Gee, maybe you should buy a new furnace; you can get one for a few thousand dollars,” and you replied, “Buy a new furnace? What are you, crazy? I could never afford that! Burning the $100 bills is the only reasonable thing to do."

We have a natural tendency to assume that someone who says something is unaffordable is being, if perhaps a bit of a downer, at least logical. Who tells you things are unaffordable when you’re growing up? Your parents, who say, no, our next car will not be Ferrari, and you can’t have an Xbox. It makes you mad when you’re a kid, but when you grow up, you realize they were right.

But right now, it’s the people who say universal coverage is unaffordable and want to continue with the status quo who are suggesting something outlandish. Which is why, whenever someone says a universal system would be unaffordable, the appropriate follow-up question is: “If we don’t change, we’re going to spend $50 trillion over the next 10 years. How do you propose to pay for that?”

There’s another follow-up question we should be asking, because universal coverage isn’t some kind of novel idea no one has tried before: “If universal coverage is so unaffordable, how come every other industrialized country on earth manages to afford it and spends less on health care than we do while insuring all their citizens? What do they know that we don’t?” Let me offer you a chart:

To repeat, every other country on that graph has universal coverage, the thing that people such as Bloomberg and Schultz believe is unaffordable. They do it in different ways-- Great Britain has a single-payer system, while Germany has private but tightly regulated insurers-- but they all cover everyone and, on average, they do it for half of what we spend. It’s great that Schultz’s company offers health insurance to its employees in the United States, but he should know that Starbucks stores in other industrialized countries don’t have to, because the government takes care of it.

That doesn’t mean that achieving universal coverage will be easy, or won’t require lots of policy choices, or won’t need tweaking over time as it evolves. If anyone characterizes it as something simple to implement, they aren’t being honest either. But if we’re going to talk about the cost-- as we should-- we absolutely have to talk about the cost of the current system.

No one would claim that moving to a system of universal coverage, whether through single-payer or something else, wouldn’t be a profound change. But we have a bias toward the assumption that change is impractical while maintaining the status quo-- no matter how pathological the status quo may be-- is if nothing else reasonable and practical.

In this case, it isn’t. Maintaining the status quo is a choice, a choice that will cost us $50 trillion. That’s the single most important fact to keep in mind as we talk about cost, and the people who have already forgotten it ought to know better.

Right now, these are the only members of Congress who have signed on to co-sponsor Pramila Jayapal's new Medicare-For-All bill. Many who signed on last cycle, knowing there would be no vote, refused to sign on this cycle, like Donald Norcross (New Dem-NJ), Don Beyer (New Dem-VA), Filemon Vela (Blue Dog-TX), Brad Sherman (CA), Katherine Clark (MA), Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA), Nita Lowey (NY), Adam Schiff (New Dem-CA), Marc Veasey (New Dem-TX), Ted Deutch (FL), Pete Viscloskey (IN), Darren Soto (New Dem-FL), Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN), Al Lawson (New Dem-FL), Ed Perlmutter (New Dem-CO), Jerry McNerney (CA), Lou Correa (New Dem-CA), Anthony Brown (New Dem-MD), John Yarmuth (KY), Gregory Meeks (New Dem-NY), Cathy Castor (FL), Brian Higgins (NY), Jimmy Panetta (CA)... And that's just a few of the 2017-18 co-sponsors who aren't co-sponsoring (so far) this year. If your congressman or congresswoman isn't on this list, please call-- 202-858-1717-- and ask why. And freshmen who campaigned on Medicare-For-All (or even the more amorphous "swingle payer" but who aren't on this list, should be reminded there's another election in less than 2 years).

Nate McMurray hasn't announced yet, but I'm pretty certain he's going to run in NY-27 again. Early this morning he told us that "People want single payer. I campaigned in one of the supposed 'red' districts in America, and we lost by only 0.38%. Everyday I said I will demand single payer, and everyday the crowds grew and cheered. If members of Congress who pledged to fight for single payer do not have the courage to lead, why will Americans trust them to lead again!"

My own congressman, Adam Schiff, was a cosponsor of HR 676 so I was curious about why his name wasn't on the list for the new bill. I thought he might be so busy impeaching Trump that he hadn't gotten to it yet. I contacted his office and a longtime spokesperson confirmed that he "plans signing on as an original co-sponsor of Rep. Jayapal’s Medicare for All bill." I'm glad I reminded them. Please do the same with your own member. Meanwhile, sincere, full-throated support for Medicare-for-All should be a MUST for all congressional candidates. It is for Blue America.

Mike Siegel is running for the Austin to Houston corridor seat held by Michael McCaul, a Republican who would rather repeal Medicare than expand it. But Siegel running hard on Medicare for all. "The people want Medicare for All, and we cannot squander this rare opportunity. Countless lives depend on Democrats seizing the moment and standing for a bold solution to our national healthcare crisis. Here in Texas 10, and I am running on Medicare for All, and will enthusiastically vote for it in 2021 if we haven't passed it yet. Despite what many might think about Texas, folks here identify with the simple concept of extending Medicare to every person. And when the inevitable question comes up-- how will we pay for it?-- we need to be able to respond that only by having a true universal healthcare program can we realize the necessary savings in terms of administrative costs, prescription drugs, and so forth. Of course, the incumbent Michael McCaul, not only opposes MFA, but he opposes the ACA and just about any government healthcare program. He couldn't care less about whether regular Texans live or die. My campaign offers a real alternative on this life-or-death issue, and I'm confident that the voters will respond."

In Omaha, Kara Eastman is also taking on an anti-healthcare Republican incumbent, Don Bacon. "The reality for residents of the Nebraska 2nd is that far too many people do not have access to healthcare," she told us-- our Governor is dragging his feet on the Medicaid expansion bill that passed on the ballot in November-- or are paying far too much in out of pocket expenses including deductibles, premiums and non-covered expenses. My 17-year -old daughter’s recent knee surgery cost us $5000 out of pocket and this is with 'excellent' insurance through my husband’s employer. A Medicare-for-All system is the best option we have for being fiscally responsible and providing medical care to Americans. Rep. Don Bacon is putting special interests before the needs of his constituents. He is bought and sold by the insurance, pharmaceutical, and healthcare companies and healthcare companies that profit off of people being sick. This is sickening."

In Chicago and in Flagstaff, Arizona, Blue America is backing primary candidates Marie Newman and Eva Putzova who are also running against incumbents who is putting special interests before the needs of his constituents-- except their opponents ultra-conservative Blue Dogs who vote with the GOP-- Dan Lipinski and Tom O'Halleran. "Healthcare is a right, not a privilege," Eva told us. "It's time that our political ambitions move beyond expanding Medicare to just cover hearing aids for elderly and focus on expanding Medicare to cover all Americans. Medicare For All is the kind of system that will do just that.

Marie is coming from the same values. "While this $32 trillion number over 10 years is bandied about without framework in order to create hysteria, It i clear that it is much more affordable than the $50 trillion it will cost us keeping the current system in place. Let’s all accept that the ACA was a good step and enabled 20 million more folks to have insurance, but, unfortunately, it did not solve ever-rising costs. My hope is that we can all stop with the hysteria and have a real conversation and debate. Their are no less than 8 M4All bills out there right now. Congresswoman Jayapal’s bills looks strong, lets start there and get this solved."


UPDATE: Audrey Denney

"One of the most prevalent misconceptions I hear when I’m advocating for universal healthcare is that we cannot afford it. In actuality, we can’t afford to not guarantee quality healthcare to all Americans. Paying for Medicare for All wouldn’t require additional spending-- just a reallocation of private and public money we’re already spending. Our broken healthcare system tops the list of issues facing many voters in my district. When elected, I’ll continue to advocate for Medicare for All and work to make sure we get the system change we need. No American should go bankrupt because they can’t afford life-saving care."


UPDATE II: More Members Sign On As Co-Sponsors

These are all members who have been enthusiastic supporters of Medicare-For-All who just didn't make the first batch on signers for one reason or another. They are all officially on board as of this morning.

• Katherine Clark (D-MA)
• Jahana Hayes (D-CT)
• Brain Higgins (D-NY)
• Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA)
• Jackie Speier (D-CA)
• Bennie Thompson (D-MS)
• Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ)

Attacking Trump: A How To Guide

In his Washington Post column this afternoon, What’s the Democratic argument against Trump? Here’s one answer, Paul Waldman starts with a little joke that makes Trump sound like a vaguely "normal" president: "When he delivers the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Trump will reach out to his opponents in a spirit of unity, exploring areas where we can put aside our differences and solve problems together, as the American people so desperately want."

Chuckle, chuckle. Waldman made sure readers knew that he was kidding and wrote that "We all know that’s not what he’ll do. The SOTU may have a line or two about our common destiny or some such, but like all of Trump’s speeches and pretty much everything he says, it will almost certainly be intended to create and maintain division. With a new Democrat entering the 2020 presidential race every few days and the largest TV audience he’ll have all year, this address will be the unofficial start of Trump’s reelection campaign." So how will Democrats go after Trump in 2020? He wants us to think about what Dems want the public to believe about the worst occupant of the White House ever?. "Since Trump provides such a target-rich environment of character flaws, incompetence, mismanagement and a general air of crisis, there are multiple ways Democrats might choose to attack him, some of which would be more effective than others."

We’ve obtained an early look at some memos in which the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the 501(c)(4) arm of the most influential Democratic think tank, lays out the message it thinks will be most effective against Trump. They focus mainly on the idea that Trump broke the promises he made to the public during the 2016 campaign; those broken promises will form the foundation of the case they make against him. They’ve even got a website with shareable graphics.

I think this is an interesting way to frame the argument for a number of reasons. Here’s their synopsis:

The spotlight on these promises will synthesize what are already the American people’s worst perceptions of him, namely that he is dishonest; that contrary to his “populist” campaign rhetoric, he is primarily concerned with helping the wealthiest and big corporations rather than the middle- or working class; and that he is personally corrupt, running a corrupt government. [...]

Most notably on the economy, candidate Trump made grand unequivocal promises that he would raise taxes on the wealthy including himself; that no more factories would close in America; that every decision he made would be guided by raising wages; that every American would get health coverage; and that he would crack down on Wall Street. In every instance, he has pursued policies that would do exactly the opposite.

There’s ample evidence in Trump’s own statements for these claims, things like “Wall Street has caused tremendous problems for us. We’re going to tax Wall Street,” which he said in January 2016. But the question isn’t whether you can make this case but whether this is what you’d choose to be the centerpiece of your argument against him.

The most important feature of this argument is that it isn't really aimed at liberals. Yes, liberals object to what Trump has done on the economy, but if you're saying Trump shouldn't be reelected because he broke his promises, your primary target is people who believed those promises when they were made. As a liberal I'm not mad that Trump broke his promises to me, because I never believed them in the first place. But saying "He broke his promises" allows a Trump voter to agree without feeling like they were foolish for voting for him in the first place.

That’s probably wise. As tempting as it is to say, “Anyone who believed what Trump said was an idiot,” you can’t win people over if you begin by insulting them. But it does assume that there are people who voted for Trump who will now be open to voting for a Democrat.

This line also declines to focus on Trump’s personality, apart from noting how often he has lied about the things he promised. Recall that in 2016, Hillary Clinton spent a great deal of time arguing that Trump’s character, temperament, and views rendered him unfit for the presidency, regularly assailing his ignorance, misogyny, racism, impulsiveness, and recklessness. Clinton was right about everything she said about him, but in hindsight it appears that she might have done better to focus less on his personality and more on a familiar argument that he would work to expand the wealth of the wealthy and the power of the powerful at the expense of the regular people he was claiming to represent.

That would have sounded much the same as arguments Democrats had made effectively against candidates like Mitt Romney, so perhaps it was less appealing because it didn’t seem to capture the unique threat Trump represented. But with Democratic proposals to raise taxes on the rich winning the support of huge majorities in polls, Democrats seem to believe that this is the most fruitful avenue to pursue.

Thus it is that CAP’s proposed attack line on Trump focuses heavily on his broken promises about the economy and health care, as detailed in a brief laying out those promises and how he fell well short of them.

It’s also important to remember that groups like CAP, not to mention the Democratic nominee, can focus on such broken promises, secure in the knowledge that they don’t need to make the case that Trump is a repellent human being who is unfit for the presidency. That’s apparent every day in news coverage of his actions and his own words, and with Trump’s approval ratings in the 30s, Democrats may not need to convince voters that he’s a bad guy.

In the past, Democrats have sometimes forgotten that in politics it’s necessary to simplify things. Donald Trump understands this better than anyone, which is why when he wants to attack you, he’ll find a single word to sum up his criticism (Crooked Hillary, Lyin' Ted, Liddle Marco). He has never suffered from any illusions about the voting public’s capacity for complex thinking.

I can’t say yet if “He broke his promises” is the single most effective argument to make against Trump, but it might not be a bad place to start.

Every Potential Democratic Candidate Is Better Than Trump, Even Kirsten Gillibrand

Kirsten Gillibrand by Nancy Ohanian

Paul Waldman welcomed Kirsten Gillibrand to the fray by citing psychologist Barry Schwartz's 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, pointing out that "there's a point at which having more choices-- say for 75 different kinds of shampoo-- not only can become paralyzing, it makes us less happy with whatever option we eventually settle on." He's worried that the media, let alone the voters in Iowa, won't be able to distinguish one candidate from the other. They'll all be running on anti-Trump messaging, of course, but what about an ability "to sum up their candidacies in a few sentences, or even better." he insists, "a single idea." This is what Gillibrand told Colbert's audience Tuesday night, when she announced her candidacy:

I'm going to run for president of the United States because, as a young mom, I’m going to fight for other people’s kids as hard as I would fight for my own. Which is why I believe that health care should be a right and not a privilege,” she said. “It’s why I believe we should have better public schools for our kids because it shouldn’t matter what block you grow up on. And I believe that anybody who wants to work hard enough should be able to get whatever job training they need to earn their way into the middle class.

As he says, "This is a common Democratic message, that of the desire to create a society that ensures a baseline of care for everyone (health care, education) and provides shared opportunity so that the kinds of inequality we’re suffering from today can be reined back in. If you watched Julián Castro’s announcement speech you would have heard the same thing, as you will from lots of other candidates. Both Castro and Gillibrand frame that message in terms of their own identity-- Castro talked about his immigrant grandmother and activist mother to say that he wants to fulfill the promise they worked for, while Gillibrand says she’s doing this 'as a young mom.' Sherrod Brown frames what is essentially the same vision as 'the dignity of work' ... All of which is ... fine, if not exactly enough to get you out of your seat cheering. But it has been the Democratic message pretty much forever, from both more and less liberal candidates... the reason they sound alike is that they’re from the same party, so they tend to agree about what the big problems are and how we should go about fixing them."



In his New Republic essay yesterday, Who’s Afraid of Bernie Sanders? A Lot of Democrats, Apparently, Alex Shephard singles out one Democrat who stands out from opportunists and pulse-takers like Gillibrand and most of the others. "In the wake of Bernie Sanders’s loss to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary," began Shephard, "some people argued that, as Vanity Fair put it, he 'won in the end' because his race had 'a profound, and lasting, effect on his party.' This was not a fanciful idea. The Vermont senator’s 'revolution' had succeeded beyond progressives’ wildest expectations, pushing the party leftward on health care, climate change, economic redistribution, and foreign policy. Since Barack Obama’s ascendance, no other politician has had such a deep influence on the direction of the Democratic Party-- except perhaps the sitting president."

The only "profound, and lasting, effect" Gillibrand has had in her decade and a half in politics has been on Al Franken's career. She doesn't stand for anything at all, beyond her own careerism and opportunism. Shephard wrote that 2020 will see plenty of "other formidable challengers representing the left, like Elizabeth Warren, as well as a number of more establishment candidates, like Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand, who support policies Sanders popularized such as Medicare for All and a $15 national minimum wage."

But no one really knows what Gillibrand stands for, since she stands for nothing but herself, the Democratic Party's ultimate opportunist who changes her positions-- all of them-- the way a normal person changes their clothes. No progressive looking at her record would want to consider her for two seconds. She was the post child for the NRA when they suited her ambitions and the poster child for ugly, Trump-like and King-like xenophobia when that suited her ambitions. And, despite her insincere protestations, she has never ceased to be a complete Wall Street suck-up. There is no way to know where she would stand on anything if she ever-- God forbid-- got into the Oval Office. The only positive thing any progressive could ever say about her is that she's better than Trump-- which makes it so important that she loses the primary.

One of her former congressional colleagues declined to go on record but mentioned that "She’s an unusually well-disciplined liar. Fortunately for everyone, she hasn’t yet learned how to fake sincerity." The general public doesn't know much about her yet-- aside from her highly unpopular-- and successful-- ambush of her colleague, Al Franken. Journalists will never let go of that but will go much further into why she would be the worst candidate the Democrats could put up against Trump in 2020. Here's a little tweet thread from CNN's Dan Merica after her announcement:

Is America Prepared To Keep Russia From Stealing The 2018 And 2020 Elections? With Trump In Charge? Are You Kidding?

Paul Waldman, writing for the Washington Post Tuesday was almost matter of fact: Russia is going to attack our next election. The Trump administration may not even try to stop it. He wrote that “The Russians are coming for our elections— to disrupt them, to discredit them, and even to affect their outcome. They’ll be coming in 2018, and in 2020. The trouble is that even if we figure out what they’re up to, our own government may be unable or unwilling to stop it. That’s the conclusion one has to come to upon reading reports like this new one from Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima, and Greg Jaffe, which describes how powerless the federal government has been and continues to be in the face of an ongoing war that Vladimir Putin is waging against U.S. democracy. It was hard enough to resist when the executive branch wanted to resist it; who knows how hard it will become as President Trump feels more politically threatened by upcoming elections and Robert S. Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in 2016.” And it;’s not like the U.S. can turn the tables on Putiun and help his opponent, Alexei Navalny, win the Russian election in 2018. Putin had him barred from running. So how does the U.S. fight this threat from Russia— especially with a president, his political party on Russia’s side and many of his supporters on Russia’s side?

One previously unreported order— a sweeping presidential finding to combat global cyberthreats— prompted U.S. spy agencies to plan a half-dozen specific operations to counter the Russian threat. But one year after those instructions were given, the Trump White House remains divided over whether to act, intelligence officials said.

As former acting CIA director Michael Morell and former House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Rogers note in this op-ed, Russian cyberwarfare efforts didn’t stop after 2016. Of late their covert social media strategies have involved attacking the FBI, going after Republican politicians who are critical of President Trump, and even urging a boycott of Keurig when it pulled its advertising from Sean Hannity’s show.

But it’s not as simple as promoting President Trump and the GOP. Most experts believe Vladimir Putin’s motives are more complex than that, and involve sowing discord and confusion that destabilizes our system. The danger becomes particularly acute during election season.

There are three fundamental questions to ask about this threat: Do we know what they’re doing? If we know what they’re doing, do we know how to fight it? And if we know how to fight it, do we have the will to do so?

At various times the answer to all three has been no. But let’s say that some time in 2018— or even more likely, in 2020— intelligence agencies and private analysts conclude that Russia is engaging in an effort to subvert our electoral process through hacking electoral systems, waging a covert propaganda war, or some other means we haven’t even thought of yet. What then? We know that President Trump sees every new development in terms of himself, and that he views any and all questions about Russian meddling as nothing more than an effort to delegitimize his glorious 2016 victory. It seems unlikely that he’ll react any differently to new reports of Russian meddling, particularly if it comes at a moment when he’s faced with the possibility of defeat. Which means there’s a very strong chance that this is what will happen:

• When reports of new Russian efforts to attack our elections emerge, President Trump will insist it’s all “fake news,” try to discredit the analysis and insist that it’s just his political enemies seeking to delegitimize the victories he and his party win.
• Trump’s assertion will immediately be echoed and amplified by his allies in conservative media, particularly on Fox News, talk radio, and websites like Breitbart, which will attack the analysts and agencies warning of the Russian efforts.
• Republican members of Congress will take up Trump’s charge, perhaps even attempting to launch their own investigation of the investigation.

That’s what’s happening right now. Trump’s most loyal allies are lashing out at anyone who seems to threaten the president, even if it means dismissing the idea that a well-documented Russian assault against the United States is anything to be concerned about. They’ve even decided that the FBI, one of the most conservative agencies in the government, is a hotbed of leftist subversion and must be purged of anyone who ever expressed any skepticism about Donald Trump.

Democrats Should Aim To Replace An Even 100 GOP Congressmembers

The DCCC launched an on-line ad campaign against something like 40 Republicans, including 9 California targets: Jeff Denham, Devin Nunes, David Valadao, Steve Knight, Ed Royce, Mimi Walters, Dana Rohrabacher, Darrell Issa, and Duncan Hunter. I'm sure there's a reason they're not including House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in the campaign (nor for that matter Paul Ryan. Oh, that's right, Pelosi doesn't believe in targeting Republican leaders; I almost forgot. Sunday's NY Times included an OpEd by David Leonhardt, The GOP Is Fooling Itself On Taxes about the corner the party has backed itself into on tax policy-- all in the name of "a win"-- any win. The theory is that "If they somehow fail to pass a tax cut, they will anger their base and their donors and look incompetent to swing voters. But," wrote, Leonhardt, "the actual bill that the House passed last week-- and the modestly different plan the Senate is considering-- is a dreadful piece of policy. It would cause the deficit to soar and, as a result, probably reduce economic growth. It would also raise taxes for millions of middle-class families. And most Americans realize that the tax plan is dreadful. Only 16 percent of adults said they thought the plan would reduce their own taxes, according to a Quinnipiac poll released last week. On the same day the poll came out, several Republican senators criticized the plan, which suggests it may be in jeopardy."

There is no easy way out for the party at this point. In coming days, Senate leaders will probably claim to take steps to fix the House bill’s flaws. But they won’t be able to, absent a complete rewriting. The core of the plan is the problem.

How did Republicans do this to themselves?

Above all, they refused to heed the lessons of 2016-- of Trump’s shocking romp through the primaries and even more shocking general-election win. In a time of deep economic dissatisfaction, among members of both parties, Republican leaders insisted on basing their plan around an enormous tax cut for the wealthy. Doing so pleased their donors and trickle-down true believers, but it is worth pausing for a moment on the cynicism of the plan. In substance, it is almost the direct opposite of the party’s middle-class rhetoric.

“The G.O.P.,” Henry Olsen, a conservative policy expert, recently said, “really wants to do nothing other than cut taxes for businesspeople and the top bracket based on what can only be called religious devotion to supply-side theory.”

Once Republican leaders filled their plan with tax cuts for the wealthy, they didn’t have much money left for the middle class. In the Senate, Republicans were so desperate to find money that this past week they released a new version of the bill that made virtually all of the middle-class tax cuts temporary. They expire before the bill’s final year, 2027.

An assortment of middle-class tax increases-- again, to help cover the cost of the tax cuts for the wealthy-- last for the full life of the Senate bill. As a result, it ends up being a tax increase on households making less than $75,000, according to the only rigorous analysis so far, by the Senate’s Joint Committee on Taxation. For families making somewhat more than $75,000, the tax cut is modest and likely temporary, given the deficit. The plan, says Martin Sullivan, chief economist at Tax Analysts, a highly regarded research group, has “stunningly meager tax benefits for middle class.”

The best hope for stopping the bill is the handful of Republicans willing to think beyond raw partisanship. They include Susan Collins and John McCain, who helped defeat the health bill, and Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, who aren’t running for re-election and consider themselves fiscal conservatives. (Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin, has came out against the bill, although he did the same on the health care bill, before flip-flopping.)

True, another failed attempt at major legislation would be a big political problem for the Republicans. But passing a hastily written, deficit-busting bill that harms the middle class would not be great, either. It’s impossible for these senators to solve their party’s political troubles. They may as well do the right thing.

What the Republicans seem most worried about is that their wealthy donors will abandon them if the don't pass a tax cut for wealthy people. They assume people-- voters-- will forget the details and they can keep repeating over and over, "we cut taxes," as you hear Ryan already braying ad nauseum. All that has to happen for this to work is something that's never worked before: trickle down (what George H.W. Bush called "Voodoo Economics"). Last week, Paul Waldman reminded Washington Post readers that the theories that Mick Mulvaney was espousing on CNN's State of the Union Sunday (see clip above) are all wrong.

The new plan is meant to deal with two critical constraints. The first is that the budget resolution the Senate passed allows this bill to increase the deficit by no more than $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years. The second is that the bill can’t increase the deficit at all in the 10 years following that. They need to repeal the mandate because doing so gives them $338 billion in savings to work with, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

But the CBO also says that repealing the mandate will result in 13 million fewer Americans with health insurance-- hence those savings, which won’t be spent on expanded coverage-- and increases in premiums of an additional 10 percent a year. Some people won’t realize that they’re eligible for free or heavily subsidized insurance and, without the mandate to prod them, won’t get it, and as young and healthy people pull out of the market, the remaining pool will be older and sicker, leading to premium spikes, the exit of insurers from the market, and a potential “death spiral.” There are some Republicans, including the president of the United States, who are actually dumb enough to think voters will blame Barack Obama for this.

But that’s just one element of this tax cut that is going to be incredibly unpopular. Remember that point about not being able to increase the deficit at all after 10 years? Because they want to make the corporate tax cut permanent-- since it’s the real centerpiece of this whole effort-- here’s what they’re going to do:

[Senate Republicans] also announced that the individual tax cuts in the plan would be made temporary, expiring at the end of 2025 to comply with Senate rules limiting the impact of legislation on the long-term deficit. A corporate tax cut, reducing the rate from 35 to 20 percent, would be left permanent.

In other words, if you happen to be one of the lucky people who come out ahead at first with all the complex changes to the tax code this bill makes, in 2026 your taxes will go up. It’s just getting better and better, isn’t it? So let’s review:

• The Republican tax bill raises taxes on somewhere between 16 million (Senate version) and 47 million (House version) American households; the difference is mostly because the Senate bill doesn’t get rid of as many deductions as the House bill.
• Most of the benefits of the tax bill go to the wealthy and corporations.
• It may raise taxes on people with large medical expenses, and parents who adopt children, and people with student loans, and graduate students (these provisions are in the House bill, which ends these deductions, but not the Senate bill).
• It raises taxes on people who live in states with significant state and local taxes, because it does away with this deduction (in both versions).
• Because it eliminates personal exemptions, it raises taxes on many families with multiple children (in both versions).
• It will increase insurance premiums and lead to 13 million fewer Americans with health coverage.
• It could trigger a $25 billion cut to Medicare because of existing budget rules.

If you had to sum it up simply-- for instance, if you were writing a Democratic attack ad in the 2018 election-- you could say that Republicans are raising taxes on millions of Americans and taking away health insurance from millions more, all to pay for a huge giveaway to corporations.

Of course, Republicans argue that giving corporations a tax cut will make us all enormously richer. This claim is laughable, since corporations are already earning near-record profits and unemployment is low; it’s not as though they’re starving for cash and once they get this tax cut they’ll rush to invest, create jobs and raise wages.

We now have a vivid illustration of this fact. Gary Cohn, President Trump’s chief economic adviser, was at a forum, and the moderator asked how many of the business leaders in the audience planned to increase investment if the tax reform bill passed. Only a couple of hands went up. Cohn said with a pained smile: “Why aren’t the other hands up?”

If we’re considering the politics of this bill, it’s also important to understand that very few people buy the Republican argument. In fact, most Americans think corporate taxes should be raised, not lowered. So not only are the details politically damaging, but also the core of the bill is something the public doesn’t want.

None of this means the bill won’t pass. Republicans have convinced themselves that no matter how bad the bill is, not passing anything is worse, so the chances that they’ll allow it to fail are small. But when that day comes, Democrats will know that Republicans just gave them yet another powerful issue to run on in 2018. Expect to hear them say, “Republicans have had complete control of Washington for the past two years-- and all they did was raise your taxes and yank millions from health coverage so they could lard another giveaway on corporations.” Something tells me that might be a pretty effective message.

Forbes ran a piece by Stan Collender yesterday, GOP Tax Bill Is The End Of All Economic Sanity In Washington, asserting that Ryan's tax scam "will be the start of a decades-long economic policy disaster unlike any other that has occurred in American history... [It] will increase the federal deficit by $2 trillion or more over the next decade (the official estimates of $1.5 trillion hide the real amount with a witches brew of gimmicks and outright lies) that, unless all the rules have changed, is virtually certain to result in inflation and much higher interest rates than would otherwise occur... It will "be enacted without anyone who votes for it having any understanding of the damage it could do to the economy. They have wishes, hopes and prayers but in reality nothing beyond the economic equivalent of pagan superstition... [I]f the GOP tax bill is enacted, Congress and the president this year will give up almost all ability to deal with the U.S. economy for at least a decade even when, as almost certainly will happen, there's a downturn. No one else will be able to fulfill this role. That's almost a textbook definition of economic insanity." This is what Paul Ryan has plotted his entire adult life and even if Randy Bryce defeats him in 2018-- as seems likely (you can help make that happen by tapping on the thermometer below)-- it will be too late for tech country's economic well-being.

Early this morning, The Atlantic published David Frum's musings on the Ryan Tax Scam, and though he's a proponent of corporate tax reform, he noted that "It’s a scandalous expression of upper-class and Sunbelt chauvinism that will melt away within weeks of the next Democratic electoral success. Even if it becomes law, as still seems improbable in the face of the plan’s terrible poll numbers, what firm would venture a long-term investment based on tax changes so likely unsustainable?”

And, so far, Pelosi has been incredibly successful in holding her entire caucus together in opposing this crap. Not even one stinking Republican-lite Blue Dog or New Dem-- not even Sinema, Lipinski, Peterson, Gottheimer or Cuellar-- has strayed across the aisle. Why is that important? The Democrats often find themselves unable to deliver effective messaging against congressional Republicans because these very Democrats cross the aisle and vote with Ryan and McCarthy. If the Democrats attack the GOP for passing legislation that Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party help them pass, it creates a schism inside the party and could possibly help defeat Democratic incumbents in elections, considered, in DC, the end of the world as we know it. Now, if Pelosi would just tell the DCCC to stop recruiting more Blue Dogs and New Dems, things will be a lot less complicated for the party going forward. But that isn't going to happen. Of the 11 candidates for 2018 that the DCCC has thus far officially endorsed, at least 8 are from the Republican wing of the party-- gun freak and New Dem Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ), Blue Dog Brendan Kelly (IL), Blue Dog Paul Davis (KS), New Dem Elissa Slotkin (MI), New Dem Angie Craig (MN), Blue Dog Dan McCready (NC) and Blue Dog Anthony Brindisi (NY). And, although neither Jason Crow (CO) nor Susie Lee (NV) has been officially endorsed by either the New Dems nor Blue Dogs yet, I know that stink of Republicanism emanating from both of them. Help fight Blue Dog-ism by tapping on the thermometer on the right and contributing what you can to solid progressive candidates.

Do You Agree That EVERY Republican Must Be Punished For The Passage Of TrumpCare?

Paul Ryan on TrumpCare: "This is who we are; this will come to define us."

Earlier this morning we saw how the extremely cautious Cook Report has just downgraded the chances for Republicans to hold 20 congressional districts across the country. That isn’t normal behavior for Cook; they always tend to give incumbents every benefit of every doubt… every time. But the TrumpCare vote Thursday was a political earthquake and the rumblings are just beginning. Paul Waldman’s OpEd in yesterday’s Washington Post, Every Republican who voted for this abomination must be held accountable, is reverberating in dozens of congressional districts held by Republicans— including in places where Trump won, like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania… even Texas! “I won’t mince words,” he wrote. “The health-care bill that the House of Representatives passed this afternoon, in an incredibly narrow 217-to-213 vote, is not just wrong, or misguided, or problematic or foolish. It is an abomination. If there has been a piece of legislation in our lifetimes that boiled over with as much malice and indifference to human suffering, I can’t recall what it might have been. And every member of the House who voted for it must be held accountable.” The DCCC is probably taking credit for their own “brilliant strategery.”

There’s certainly a process critique one can make about this bill. We might focus on the fact that Republicans are rushing to pass it without having held a single hearing on it, without a score from the Congressional Budget Office that would tell us exactly what the effects would be, and before nearly anyone has had a chance to even look at the bill’s actual text— all this despite the fact that they are remaking one-sixth of the American economy and affecting all of our lives (and despite their long and ridiculous claims that the Affordable Care Act was “rammed through” Congress, when in fact it was debated for an entire year and was the subject of dozens of hearings and endless public discussion). We might talk about how every major stakeholder group— the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, the AARP, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, the American Heart Association, and on and on— all oppose the bill.

All that matters. But the real problem is what’s in the bill itself. Here are some of the things it does:

• Takes health insurance away from at least 24 million Americans; that was the number the CBO estimated for a previous version of the bill, and the number for this one is probably higher.
• Revokes the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, which provided no-cost health coverage to millions of low-income Americans.
• Turns Medicaid into a block grant, enabling states to kick otherwise-eligible people off their coverage and cut benefits if they so choose.
• Slashes Medicaid overall by $880 billion over 10 years.
• Removes the subsidies that the ACA provided to help middle-income people afford health insurance, replacing them with far more meager tax credits pegged not to people’s income but to their age. Poorer people would get less than they do now, while richer people would get more; even Bill Gates would get a tax credit.
• Allows insurers to charge dramatically higher premiums to older patients.
• Allows insurers to impose yearly and lifetime caps on coverage, which were outlawed by the ACA. This also, it was revealed today, may threaten the coverage of the majority of non-elderly Americans who get insurance through their employers.
• Allows states to seek waivers from the ACA’s requirement that insurance plans include essential benefits for things such as emergency services, hospitalization, mental health care, preventive care, maternity care, and substance abuse treatment.
• Provides hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for families making over $250,000 a year.
• Produces higher deductibles for patients.
• Allows states to try to waive the ACA’s requirement that insurers must charge people the same rates regardless of their medical history. This effectively eviscerates the ban on denials for preexisting conditions, since insurers could charge you exorbitant premiums if you have a preexisting condition, effectively denying you coverage.
• Shunts those with preexisting conditions into high-risk pools, which are absolutely the worst way to cover those patients; experience with them on the state level proves that they wind up underfunded, charge enormous premiums, provide inadequate benefits and can’t cover the population they’re meant for. Multiple analyses have shown that the money the bill provides for high-risk pools is laughably inadequate, which will inevitably leave huge numbers of the most vulnerable Americans without the ability to get insurance.
• Brings back medical underwriting, meaning that just like in the bad old days, when you apply for insurance you’ll have to document every condition or ailment you’ve ever had.

It is no exaggeration to say that if it were to become law, this bill would kill significant numbers of Americans. People who lose their Medicaid, don’t go to the doctor, and wind up finding out too late that they’re sick. People whose serious conditions put them up against lifetime limits or render them unable to afford what’s on offer in the high-risk pools, and are suddenly unable to get treatment.

Those deaths are not abstractions, and those who vote to bring them about must be held to account. This can and should be a career-defining vote for every member of the House. No one who votes for something this vicious should be allowed to forget it— ever. They should be challenged about it at every town hall meeting, at every campaign debate, in every election and every day as the letters and phone calls from angry and betrayed constituents make clear the intensity of their revulsion at what their representatives have done.

Perhaps this bill will never become law, and its harm may be averted. But that would not mitigate the moral responsibility of those who supported it. Members of Congress vote on a lot of inconsequential bills and bills that have a small impact on limited areas of American life. But this is one of the most critical moments in recent American political history. The Republican health-care bill is an act of monstrous cruelty. It should stain those who supported it to the end of their days.

Andrew Sullivan-- I thought he was a Republican-- had similar ideas about how TrumpCare is further destroying the Republican brand. He sees Obamacare more clearly than deranged congressional Republicans do-- as "an effective marriage of conservative principles and, well, human decency... [T]he concept of insurance is not socialism; it’s a matter simply of pooling risk as widely as possible. If any European conservative party were to propose such a system [as TrumpCare], it would be pilloried as a far-right plot. And yet the Republican Party opposed it with a passion that became very hard for me to disentangle from hatred of Obama himself."

The Trump GOP’s attempt to abolish it is therefore, to my mind, neither conservative nor decent. It’s reactionary and callous. Its effective abandonment of 95 percent of us with preexisting conditions will strike real terror in a lot of people’s hearts. Its gutting of Medicaid will force millions of the poor to lose health care almost altogether. It will bankrupt the struggling members of the working and middle classes who find themselves in a serious health crisis. It could hurt Republicans in the midterms-- though that will be cold comfort for the countless forced into penury or sickness because of Trump’s desire for a "win." But it’s clarifying for me. It forces me to back a Democratic Party I don’t particularly care for. And it destroys any notion I might have had that American conservatism gives a damn about the vulnerable. It really is a deal-breaker for me. I hope many others feel exactly the same way.

A word of warning the people excited enough to contribute to candidates: contribute to candidates, not to hucksters and scammers looking to get rich off this. There are old groups and new groups who will hit you up for money to help this candidate or that candidate or a group of candidates and maybe they’re legit and maybe they’re partially legit— and maybe they’re not. My suggestion— always give to the candidates’ campaigns directly, never to groups promising to pass the money— most likely, some small portion of the money— along. Candidates have contribution buttons on their websites or you can always go to an ActBlue page and give to the candidates you want to help. If you want vetted candidates, DFA, PCCC, and several other groups do that. And so does Blue America. This thermometer on the right will take you to a page with congressional candidates, who are certified progressives and of good character. See if there are any you would like to help defeat the Republicans who voted for TrumpCare Thursday.