Contested Elections Are Important For A Real Democracy-- Or Are We Russia Already?

Yeah, that's Sean Duffy on the right... helping wreck America with impunity

Funny how elections focus the minds of politicians-- or at least elections where there is real opposition. when the incompetent boobs who run the DCCC announced there would be no targeting of Republican congressmembers in Wisconsin in 2018-- not of Paul Ryan, of course, but also not of Sean Duffy and Glenn Grothman-- all 5 Republican members from Wisconsin relaxed... and stopped worrying about voting for policies far to the right of what would make sense for their mainstream constituents. The other day, Duffy went on CNN and brazenly defended Donald Trump, Jr. conspiring against America with the Kremlin, in other words treason. "I don't have an issue with it," said Duffy, knowing there would be no electoral consequences for himself. "There's nothing wrong with that. That's not a crime... I have no problems with what Donald Jr. did, and I don't think any prosecutor would either."

Duffy represents a traditionally progressive district in the northwest part of the state that stretches from Wausau to the suburbs of Duluth. In 2008 Obama beat McCain 53% to 45% and in 2012 Obama lost to Romney 51-48%. Dave Obey served as congressman from WI-07 from 1969 to 2011, when he retired and the DCCC lost the district to Duffy. They didn't back the progressive Democrats who ran against Duffy in 2014 or 2016 and so far this cycle there is no Democratic candidate-- all the prospective candidates citing DCCC hostility as a reason for not running, despite the urgency of having candidates run down-ticket to help reelect Tammy Baldwin. Not to mention, keeping the party from completely atrophying in the district. Atrophying of local parties, I'm sorry to say, is the only thing the DCCC has regularly accomplished since Pelosi started calling the shots there.

Anyway, with no opponent, Duffy is free to vote in lockstep with the Trump Regime and to go on TV and promote the nonsense and lies that the Regime is built on. The congressmembers who are being targeted in the 2018 cycle are far more likely to oppose Trump and to not make crackpot statements defending treason. Look at Scott Taylor in Virginia for example, He was also on CNN this week talking about Don Jr's treason with the Russians. Trump narrowly won his Virginia Beach/Williamsburg district-- 48.8% to 45.4%-- but there are already 3 Democrats vying for the nomination to oppose him. And Taylor's CNN appearance was very different--much more mainstream-- than Duffy's. He expressed his frustration with with the bobbing and weaving the Trump regime-- and Trump family-- have been displaying in their attempts to coverup the treasonous behavior.

"The reality is, if you had some meetings, if you met some folks ... say what you've done, get it out there. But yeah, it gets frustrating when you have this. Because I do think that some of this is really overplayed and I think ultimately folks that are on the streets-- American people-- don't care. They're over it," Taylor said on CNN's The Lead.

...Taylor also criticized Congress' handling of the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion that Russia sought to influence the 2016 presidential race in favor of Trump, saying that neither Democrats nor Republicans have taken meaningful steps to deter future efforts to meddle in U.S. elections.

"What you have to have here is a policy; A policy that says to other nations they will not interfere in our election," he said. "A Monroe Doctrine in cyber, if you will. That's missing from this debate and that's very unfortunate, both on the Democrats and the Republicans."

Another Republican who is going to have a tough reelection bid, Leonard Lance, voted for TrumpCare in committee, but when his constituents went wild he switched and voted against TrumpCare when the final vote came in the House. He has been regularly running to Chris Hayes' show on MSNBC to complain about Trump. Watch what Hayes did to him on Friday evening:



It would have been a far different conversation if Sean Duffy was Hayes' guest, of that we can be very sure. In a democracy, contested elections aren't just important to pick our representatives but also to hold them accountable for their behavior. That isn't something Sean Duffy-- and scores of other Republican incumbents-- have to worry about from a DCCC that has been utterly mishandled by Nancy Pelosi from the moment she got control of it. And there are some thing Pelosi is good at. But she's in a 100% safe blue district-- Hillary beat Trump there 86.2% to 8.7%-- and she is utterly clueless about how elections work-- as are the entire upper echelon of the Democratic congressional leadership. Pelosi, Hoyer, Clyburn and Crowley don't understand electoral politics-- which is reflected by DCCC strategies. They all desperately need primaries to sharpen their own focus.

Who Thinks Congress' Function Is To Write Señor Trumpanzee A Series Of Blank Checks?

Monday morning, NPR and Marist released a new poll that looked into some questions beyond just Señor Trumpanzee's cascading disapproval numbers. For example, 61% of voters don't trust the Trumpanzee Regime, 68% don't trust the Republican-led Congress and a full 70% say that since Trumoanzee somehow managed to get into the White House, "the overall tone and level of civility in Washington between Republicans and Democrats has gotten worse." Now you know.

A new week begins! Let's look at two responses to the Regime's and Congress' determination-- some believe suicidal determination-- to strip over 20 million Americans of healthcare so they can give billions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest 2% of Americans. First from a "respected" Republican senator, Trump-critic and GOP agenda supporter Ben Sasse of Nebraska and then one of the hack Fox News commentators, Lisa Kennedy Montgomery (or, if you used to listen to Nirvana and Depeche Mode on KROQ back in the day, just... Kennedy). Sunday, Sasse was on CNN's State of the Union. He's the guy who seems to have persuaded Trumpanzee to do an about face on his insistence for "repeal and replace" and go back to the original GOP plan of just "repeal" and see what can be done sometime down the road in never-never land. Sounds like a real right-wing jackass, right? He is-- always has been too. BUT... Sasse is known nationally, thanks to our media geniuses, for serially being offending by Trump's manners and speaking out against his crudeness, even as he pushes Trump's murderous agenda forward on every front.

Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse said Sunday that he is troubled by President Donald Trump's latest attacks on the news media because he is concerned about the danger of "weaponizing distrust," which can harm the freedoms that define a democracy.

"There's an important distinction to draw between bad stories or crappy coverage and the right that citizens have to argue about that and complain about that and trying to weaponize distrust," Sasse said in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN's State of the Union. "The First Amendment is the beating heart of the American experiment, and you don't get to separate the freedoms that are in there."

The Republican freshman senator's remarks come after Trump spent the past week relentlessly attacking the news media-- including CNN, MSNBC, CBS and the Washington Post-- in a barrage of tweets and at event honoring veterans Saturday night at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

"The fake media is trying to silence us, but we will not let them," Trump said, without offering any evidence that journalists-- who cover every public remark made by the President-- have attempted to silence him.

"The fake media tried to stop us from going to the White House," Trump said. "But I'm President and they're not."

Sasse added that while "(t)here are a whole bunch of particular journalists who should be called out for particular stories that aren't good enough," it is "not helpful to call the press the enemy of the American people"-- a direct reference to language used by the President to describe journalists.

Trump has referred to the media as "the enemy of the people" several times since taking office, telling the annual Conservative Political Action Conference last winter, "A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people, and they are-- they are the enemy of the people."

Trump used the same language in February, tweeting, "The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!"

Sasse said that while he agrees with Trump "that there's a lot of crappy journalism out there," if Americans are not open to hearing differing views, it's "going to be possible for people to surround themselves only with echo chambers and silos of people that already believe, only believe what they believe."

"We differ about really big and important things in this country and then we come together around the First Amendment, which is an affirmation of the fact that people are free before government," he added. "I mean, this is the Fourth of July weekend. The Declaration of Independence is pretty dang clear about this-- that we think government is just our shared tool to secure those rights."

The morally outraged and sagacious Señor Sasse has a ZERO ProgressivePunch crucial vote score for the entire 6 months since Trump got into the White House. He hasn't voted against a single Trump nominee nor has he been at variance with a single Trump initiative. (Like Sasse, most Senate Republicans just serve as rubber stamps for every single thing Trump wants. Only 16 Republicans have voted at least once-- and most of them, only once-- against something-- anything-- Trump-related.)

I don't know where Fox News is on my TV-- and I haven't heard Kennedy's voice since she was a KROQ dj but Think Progress reported a couple days ago that she was on-air excusing her party's decision to take healthcare away from over 20 million Americans-- thinning the herd-- as "progressive hysteria" that didn't really matter since "we're all," in her very, very, very GOP words, "going to die" anyway. "We’re all going to die. And they can’t predict--  there’s no way unless they are absolutely psychic and have a party line to heaven, they don’t know who’s going to die or when or how many people." Fox is so amazing. There wouldn't be a Trump-- couldn't be a Trump-- without it. Thanks, Bill Clinton for giving that to America, your most enduring legacy. How'd that deal work out for you?

Unless you live in the Hampton Roads, Norfolk, Virginia Beach area, you probably never heard of Scott Taylor, another hapless Paul Ryan rubber stamp and unaccomplished backbencher, basically a waste of a congressional seat in a district Obama won twice but that the DCCC just keeps botching up. Last year Hillary lost to Trump there 48.8-45.4%. Taylor is a freshman, who last year defeated Democrat Shaun Brown, 61.3% to 38.5% in what everyone would agree is a swing district. Why that big disparity? Was it the DCCC's fault? Yeah. Brown raised $27,892 to Taylor's $839,485 for the open seat race. The DCCC spent zero on her race, hating her because she's a strong advocate of progressive policies and, worse in their eyes, a former Bernie delegate. It looks like she'll be running against Taylor again this year. Yesterday Taylor, who has voted in lockstep with Trump 100% of the time, was on CNN. When Alisyn Camerota asked him about Trump, his response was "I did not come on here to defend the president." No he's out on the media circuit to help push the idea that loyal Republicans have to give Trump a blank check... on everything. His vote score is ZERO, rare in a swing district. His ProgressivePunch voting record summary is pretty breathtaking:

Who thinks we need a more competent, better-led DCCC?