Why Using Identity Politics As A Filter Is A Road To Nowhere

Last cycle, the two biggest self-funders looking to buy House seats were David Trone in Maryland, who spent a phenomenal $13,414,225 of his own and took 35,400 votes (27.1%) in his primary, and Randy Perkins in Florida who spent $10,127,029 of his own and then lost to a Republican, by over 10 points 53.6% to 43.1%. The only million dollar Democratic self-funder who won in 2016 was Vicente Gonzalez, a real sleaze from south Texas, who spent $1,850,000 of his own dough. Although he's a real conservative piece of crap who joined the Blue Dogs as soon as he got into Congress, he knew which lever to pull to get an endorsement from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. You can't trust anyone in DC these days.

And the CPC did it again this week, although there's no indication any money changed hands on this one. Just some shitty identity politics. Two Orange County candidates were up for endorsement-- strong progressive Katie Porter and shifty New Dem Dave Min. Porter was strongly backed by Elizabeth Warren, who sent out a letter just before the CPC vote Thursday:

Progressive ideas are good for working people across this country AND progressive ideas win!

That's why Democrats need to nominate candidates who believe in policies like Medicare For All, expanding Social Security benefits, debt-free college, higher wages for workers, and strong consumer protections.

Katie Porter is one of the boldest and most progressive candidates for Congress in 2018. I've known Katie and worked with her for years, and I'll tell you this: she's tough as nails. When she gets into a fight to help out families who have been cheated, she doesn't give up.

Katie is running for Congress in Orange County, California in one of the most flippable districts in the nation... A new poll shows Katie defeating Republican incumbent Mimi Walters if the general election were held today. In fact, the numbers aren't even close.

That's because Katie is fighting for working families, and she is running a grassroots campaign. And while Republicans in Congress are doing their darnedest to rig our economy and our political system even more for folks at the top, people get that they're the ones paying the price.

During the recent tax fight, Katie's Republican opponent voted for more than a trillion dollars in tax giveaways to giant corporations. But here's what really is a show-stopper: she also voted to eliminate a provision of the tax code that would help her own constituents who were hit by recent wildfires. When people say the system has been bought by big donors, this is what they are talking about.

After she was my student almost 20 years ago, Katie became an expert in the complex law of bankruptcy.

We worked together for years studying why millions of American families were in so much financial trouble. She became a law professor herself out in California. And in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris appointed her to be California's top consumer watchdog-- fighting to hold the big banks accountable and help Californians who lost their homes.

About a year ago, I had breakfast with Katie. We were all still reeling from the election. After talking about her kids, Katie said, "This is terrible. The banks, they're gonna let them go at it again. They'll roll back the regulations on pollution, poison our children." And then she said, "Elizabeth, I'm thinking about running for office." And I said exactly one thing in return, "If you run, I will be there every step of the way."

I've seen Katie's commitment and grit up close and personal. Sending Katie to Congress in this winnable district would put us one seat closer to taking back the House in 2018 and give us another incredible strong ally.

Sounds good, right? So where does the problem come in? In the House, Mark Takano is a progressive voter. But, as with too many people, identity politics is more important to him than progressive, values-based politics. He knew his New Dem Dave Min could never be endorsed but he organized around race to keep the vote from Porter, potentially jeopardizing the ability of the Democrats winning the seat. One of the congressmembers he organized-- one I respect too much to name-- claimed that when she sees two candidates vying for endorsement, who are both progressive, she always goes with the person of color. That's her right. She could have just as easily said that when she sees two candidates who are both progressive, she always goes with the woman. But the fact of the matter is that in this particular case, one candidate is a real progressive and the other is a corporate New Dem who is as forthright and honest as... Donald Trump. He'll say whatever it takes to persuade whoever is listening to him. The worst of the worst. And he succeeded-- in great part because of Takano-- in blocking Katie Porter from getting the CPC endorsement. That has help prompt us to move Katie Porter from just our California Act Blue page to a full fledged endorsement on our congressional page (which you can see by tapping of the thermometer on the right.) Please help us send the DC Dems a little message by contributing to Katie's campaign today.

This week the political director of a group I admire very much was trying to get me to endorse a candidate in Texas. I said the candidate hadn't persuaded me she will be a progressive if she wins the seat. "But she's a lesbian," was the response. That's horrifying. Indentifying as a lesbian doesn't say anything to me about how someone will prioritize Climate Change, banning assault weapons, holding Wall Street banksters accountable or dealing with economic inequity. Look at Krysten Sinema (AZ). She's the single most right-wing Democrat in the House-- and head of the Blue Dogs to boot-- and she identifies as a lesbian. Or look at Sean Patrick Maloney-- a happily married gay man with a wonderful family-- but the most right-wing New Dem in Congress, completely in Wall Street's pocket. (Obviously, another married gay man, Mark Pocan from Wisconsin, is what the political director would have liked me to see when I considered the quality of the Texas candidate. Mark has the best voting record in Congress. He should be the model for every Democrat, regardless of sexual identity, race, religion, gender, country of origin or whatever identity group anyone wants to look use as a filter.)

Bye-Bye Matthew Peterson-- We Were Just Getting To Know You

-by Noah

As is made clear in the clip, here is a Trump judicial nominee, Matthew Peterson, being grilled, by a southern Republican senator no less, about his fanciful qualifications to be a federal judge. This after another Trump judicial nominee, Brett Talley, an apparent KKK sympathizer, who withdrew his own nomination, after it was revealed that his wife works for Trump at the White House and that he had only been practicing law for 3 years. These guys were so lame even a few Republicans looked at them sideways after all of the rubber-stamping of Trump's deplorable job candidates they've done already.

Appointing people who are uniquely and especially unqualified for their positions is all part of the Señor Trumpanzee style. After all, if Trump himself is the ultimate case of not being qualified for one's job, why would we expect him to appoint people who are ready to take on the responsibilities of the job they are given? This is a measure of Trump's contempt for us all, not to mention America itself.

We've already got a cabinet full of sicko clowns who were chosen for their position because they hate the very idea of the department they've been put in charge of. Hence, Scott Pruitt, who hates the very idea of putting the words 'environment' and 'protection' together, being confirmed by the $enate to be head of the E.P.A., Betsy DeVos, who has an obvious aversion to education, being named Secretary of Education, and so on. Then, there's the example of Trumpanzee's own family wedding planner, Lynne Patton, being named to oversee billions of dollars as Head of New York's Federal Housing Office. What could go wrong there, especially when her boss owns so much real estate in New York?

Clearly, Trump's appointments are all about destruction, mayhem, and money; all the more reason to appoint judges who don't just have zero respect for regulations and laws, but don't even have knowledge of such things. Most of these judicial appointments are for life, too. Think of the damage to our country; anything to make Putin and Xi Jinping happy. If that isn't what Trump is all about, tell me what is.

Matthew Peterson is such a complete farce of a nomination that the Peterson clip went full viral within an hour. I did think, however, that there was one very pertinent question that Peterson was not asked at his Senate hearing. I would have asked him if he had ever attended a law school. Peterson comes off as a 8th grader who's trying to fake his way through a surprise quiz. He demonstrates so much contempt for the law that he didn't even bother to bone up on the terminology. He's a perfect manifestation of Trump.

Truly, Trump knows "the best people."

UPDATE: Yesterday It Was Announced...

...that Matthew Peterson is now officially an un-person. The Regime has disappeared him, allowing him to "withdraw" from the lifetime judgeship they hadn't bothered vetting him for. The exposure of Peterson's and Trump's attempted fraud on the judicial system offers clear evidence that social media can, from time to time, have a positive effect in our society. Peterson faked it all the way to a Senate hearing but at least had enough of a shred of decency to admit his incompetence and lack of qualifications for the job and walk away, unlike the man who nominated him, who, as of this writing, is still occupying the Oval Office.

The Humiliation Of Ted Cruz, Mike Pence, The Republican Party-- While The Demented Donald Laughs At America

The superficially crafted messaging of the Republican convention has been stepped on and obliterated every day. But Hillary better not feel powerful for having had anything to do with it. It's all Trump and his incompetent, deranged micro-campaign that's causing all the seemingly self-destructive chaos. Trump lifted those plagiarized passages from Michelle Obama's speech and put them into Melania's address and ate up two-and-a-half days of headlines that might have gone to republican messaging. Trump lured Ted Cruz into an untenable position last night, overshadowing, Mike Pence's introduction to the nation as the two squared off in some kind of an alternative universe 2020 preview.

I'm not Ted Cruz fan, but you almost feel sorry for the guy. Trump had originally said that unless his former rivals endorsed him in advance, they wouldn't get convention speaking slots. It kind of worked on sweaty, wormy Rubio but Ted Cruz-- who was not going to humiliate himself by publicly fellating the man who denigrated him and his family so violently-- well that turned into the kind of chaos Trump loves to spark and then take advantage of. Cruz decided to address the convention-- packed with really dumb Trump supporters-- without endorsing the legitimate party nominee. Trump was waiting for him, with a well-coordinated whip plan for strategic booing and camera-chaos. This is what America woke up to this morning:

David Frum referred to what Cruz did last night as "his brave and noble act" and I tend to see it similarly-- with reservations. Many others put Cruz in a far less heroic light-- even as a backstabber. Patricia Murphy at Roll Call: Having already identified Trump "a narcissist and a pathological liar," Cruz "exacted his revenge and refused to endorse Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention meant to unify GOP support behind his nomination." Politico noted that "Boos rained down on Cruz, and his wife had to be escorted from the hall amid verbal taunts in an unreal scene that marked an end to a surreal primary season."

“We deserve leaders who stand for principle, who unite us all behind shared values, who cast aside anger for love,” Cruz said. “That is the standard we should expect from everybody.”

It was a standard that Cruz determined Trump did not meet.

“Don’t stay home in November,” Cruz told the audience. “Stand and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”

But he wouldn’t say Trump’s name.

In doing so, Cruz handed Hillary Clinton and the Democrats a potentially devastating cudgel of a slogan-- “vote your conscience”-- with which to hammer Trump all the way through November. Clinton grabbed it immediately, tweeting the phrase and a link to a voter registration page.

So... yes, Cruz kicked off his 2020 election campaign-- probably against Hillary, in the GOP's alternative universe, against President Gas. Byron York pointed out Cruz is taking a big gamble with his political future. "No one," he correctly asserted, "will know whether he won or lost until a few years from now... The upside of Cruz's gamble is that in one brief appearance, he won the intensified support of those Republicans who cannot reconcile themselves to Trump. And, if Trump goes down to defeat in November-- and it's safe to say everyone in that group believes he will-- Cruz will have serious I-told-you-so cred. Then, the theory goes, he will be in a strong position to put the party back together and run in 2020.

The scene irritated the still-raw feelings of some veterans of the 2016 GOP race. Veteran Republican strategist Curt Anderson, who ran Bobby Jindal's campaign, saw in Cruz's action far more calculation than principle, recalling the days when Cruz expressed admiration and affection for Trump.

"No one did more to create Donald Trump than Ted Cruz did," Anderson wrote in an email shortly after Cruz's speech. "While others were attempting to stop Trump, Cruz was complimenting him and sucking up to him. It was a political calculation that failed. Everything he does is a political calculation. Tonight he calculated that not endorsing the Republican nominee will be good for him. That will be another failed calculation, no matter whether Trump wins or loses in the fall."

Anderson was by no means alone in that feeling. Talking to attendees leaving the hall Wednesday night, most were unhappy with Cruz's performance. They didn't like the fact that Cruz would not fall in line behind his party's choice, and they could not understand his decision in light of their strong belief that the country has gone downhill fast under President Obama and will continue unless Hillary Clinton is stopped.

On the other hand, Sarah Palin, one of Trump's most blood-thirsty lady enforcers, has declared Cruz, henceforth, a persona-non-grata in the Republican Party:

Cruz’s broken pledge to support the will of the people tonight was one of those career-ending “read my lips” moments. I guarantee American voters took notice and felt more unsettling confirmation as to why we don’t much like typical politicians because they campaign one way, but act out another way. That kind of political status quo has got to go because it got us into the mess we’re in with America’s bankrupt budgets and ramped up security threats.

It’s commonplace for politicians to disbelieve their word is their bond, as evidenced by Cruz breaking his promise to endorse his party’s nominee, evidently thinking whilst on the convention stage, “At this point, what difference does it make?” We’ve been burned so horribly by that attitude that voters won’t reward politicians pulling that “what difference does it make” stunt again. Politicians will see — it makes all the difference in the world to us.

Who knew Palin was such a Talking Heads fan!



Josh Marshall tried to make sense out of what happened last night for normal observers-- but found it almost impossible. "Trump's convention is everything you could have predicted: a mix of bracing disorganization, provocation, aggression and lies. It is simply impossible to pick apart the incompetence from the transgressive behavior and pettiness... Years from today we will still wrestle with the meaning of Cruz for once leveraging the awesome power of his assholery in a righteous cause. Perhaps there is a salutary bravery or solidity there I hadn't noticed, or at least a quality vouchsafed for this moment. This is Trump. His convention would be his presidency-- entertaining and hilarious if he weren't also a live wire against the fumy gasoline can set against our national home. It is quite literally a terrifying prospect. He's quite likely to lose his quest for the presidency. But he might not. He's that close to the unimaginable. And he's brought almost an entire political party along with him. We will be blessed if we can escape this with no more harm."

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Road To Nowhere?

The new issue of New York magazine features a powerful call to action by former Senator Russ Feingold, one of the two most tragic losses of the 2010 teabagger tsunami-- the other we'll get to in a moment. It must always be an embarrassment to President Obama when someone starts talking about FDR. Keep in mind, of course, that Feingold has urged Democrats to close ranks behind Obama and stop talking about fantasy primaries against our disappointing, middle of the road president. But his story is called The Middle Road to Nowhere. The word "Obama" never appears in the story:

When I was growing up in Janesville, Wisconsin, my parents had hung a painting of FDR with an inscription to the effect of “Never was one man loved by so many, and hated by so many.” I often puzzled over that inscription, but I am puzzling no more.

One of FDR’s enduring strengths was his rejection of ideological constraint. He sought solutions that could actually address problems, no matter where those solutions might sit on the political spectrum. But freeing oneself from ideological restrictions is not the same as seeking the middle ground. Today, many prominent elected officials, as well as a few prominent editorial pages, tend to celebrate the centrist path no matter the policy outcome and condescendingly reject ideas championed by those they believe occupy a less moderate position.

That is utter nonsense. The test of an idea is not whether it belongs to the political left, right, or center. The test of an idea is whether it will work. Yet too many of our nation’s current political leaders seem to be captives of a kind of political GPS system, programmed to seek either a specific set of principles laid down by a fervent base or, alternatively, a political middle ground whose inhabitants observe profoundly that “both sides dislike it, so it must be right.”

A favorite and related concept of these same sages is that of bipartisanship, but for them bipartisanship is not so much members of different parties’ hammering out meaningful solutions as it is a group of middle-grounders who can be relied upon to embrace impotent proposals. To many in the Beltway, bipartisanship itself has become its own hollow ideology.

True bipartisanship, of course, can be a powerful engine of pragmatic solutions. The campaign-finance reform I constructed with Senator John McCain was a classic, substantive measure that certainly did not adhere to any one ideology. And in my eighteen years in the Senate I was privileged to participate in several other serious bipartisan endeavors. But we shouldn’t confuse real efforts at cooperation with those that cloak the inadequacy of a middle road to nowhere with the label of bipartisanship. They may make some editorial boards happy, but they won’t get the job done.

The ideological descendants of Wisconsin voters who brought us Joe McCarthy saw fit to replace Russ Feingold with a senator who actually rivals McCarthy in terms of his perfidy against working people and against democracy itself, Ron Johnson. The other grotesque tragedy from the 2010 elections saw Orlando voters replacing Alan Grayson with Taliban Dan Webster, who's not as bad as Johnson only because he's so much stupider and less effective. Last week Grayson was up in DC and he wrote about visiting some of his old-- and, hopefully, future-- colleagues on the House floor. He asked one what she thought about the Republicans being in charge now.

"They want to do all these things that are unconstitutional. It's as though they've never heard of the Constitution."

I really hadn't thought of it that way. Cruel? Yes. Bigoted? Yes. But unconstitutional?

They claim to be the only patriots. They claim to own the flag. And they claim that the Constitution is theirs. Support our campaign, because we have the guts to tell them they are wrong.

I realized that she probably was referring to this gross obsession over what the federal deficit might or might not be in the year 2021, ten years from now.

Here is a simple fact, which seems to have eluded this tea-infused Congress. One Congress cannot dictate to any other Congress. Particularly when it comes to taxing and spending. So all of this gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over what the federal deficit might be in ten years is utterly-- utterly-- pointless. It's like trying to amend the law of gravity.

Under Article I, Section 7 of our Constitution, each Congress has the same right as another other Congress to legislate. This includes "raising Revenue" and "Appropriation of Money." (The Founding Fathers were pretty wacky when it came to initial caps, weren't they?) So our 112th Congress can "pass a Bill" setting the federal deficit for this year and next year, but that's about it. Anything that goes beyond the first week of January, 2013, when the 113th Congress will be sworn in, is subject to change by that Congress, and every subsequent Congress.

The Constitution also has this to say on the subject, in Article I, Section 8: "no Appropriation of Money [to raise and support Armies] shall be for a longer Term of two Years." (Which tells us precisely what the Founding Fathers would have thought about a 10-year war in Afghanistan and an 8-year war in Iraq, but that is another story.)

Way back in 1879, i.e., long before the U.S. Supreme Court became an extrusion of the Republican Party, the Supreme Court also weighed in, in this holding:

Every succeeding legislature possesses the same jurisdiction and power with respect to [public interests] as its predecessors. The latter have the same power of repeal and modification which the former had of enactment, neither more nor less. All occupy, in this respect, a footing of perfect equality. This must necessarily be so in the nature of things. It is vital to the public welfare that each one should be able at all times to do whatever the varying circumstances and present exigencies touching the subject involved may require. A different result would be fraught with evil.

Newton v. Commissioners, 100 U.S. 548, 559 (1879).

Politically, all this teabag deficit-mongering is a weapon on mass distraction. But constitutionally, it's a farce.

In a way, this shouldn't surprise anyone. They waive the Tenth Amendment around as if it were a magic wand. They want to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment because they don't like the idea that everyone born in America is American; in other words, they want the sins of the fathers to descend on the sons. They want to insert bookkeeping into the Constitution (the so-called "Balanced Budget Amendment"), but take a woman's right to choose out of it. And, of course, their hand-picked, litmus-tested, original-intented judges have thrown out over a century of constitutional precedent (e.g., Citizens United) whenever they've felt like it.

Instead of defiling the Constitution, I think that we should concentrate on the things that matter in our lives:

Jobs.

Health.

Peace.

Real problems, and how to solve them.

Hopefully Alan will be doing that in the House again after the next elections. (You can help that along here.) The Senate has always been a dicier place for people willing to abandon the middle of the road-- although on the extreme right, Ron Johnson has plenty of company considering his lockstep voting with fellow teabaggers Jim DeMint, Mike Lee, Pat Toomey, David Vitter, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. Working families don't get much love-- beyond Bernie Sanders, Tom Harkin and Jeff Merkley-- these days. That could change, quite drastically, is Elizabeth Warren wins her battle in Massachusetts against middle of the road nothing Scott Brown. Digby explained it to Al Jezeera readers yesterday, riffing off this now famous video of a recent house-party.

With those words, Elizabeth Warren cemented her reputation as a person who knows how to speak to Americans about progressive values in a way that seems to have eluded almost every other public figure in America. There's just something about the way she talks in plain prairie English that makes people listen-- and scares even the most hardened businessman and compromised politician into paying attention.

...That's how it was in America in the good old days, boom and bust, no security, no solid middle class, no upward mobility for those who lose on the downside of the cycle.

She points out that it was three specific laws that came out of the Great Depression that changed all of that and set the stage for the longest run of uninterrupted prosperity in the nation's history: FDIC Insurance, Glass-Steagel and the SEC.

And she points out that when those regulations began to erode, productivity and wages started their great divergence and the middle class began to fray around the edges. By 2011, that fraying has become a full blown unraveling. Here are just a few random statistics compiled by businessinsider.com:

- 61 per cent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 per cent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007

- 66 per cent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1 per cent of Americans

- 43 per cent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved for retirement

- 24 per cent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age

- Only the top 5 per cent of US households earned enough to match the rise in housing costs since 1975

- In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1; since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 and 500 to 1

- The bottom 50 per cent of income earners in the US now collectively own less than 1 per cent of the nation's wealth

- More than 40 per cent of Americans who are actually employed are now working in service jobs, which are often low paying.

...Win or lose the Senate seat, she is doing a service to the country by having the guts to face down the powerful and say what needs to be said. And it's inspiring progressives all over the country, including, some say, the president himself.

You can help Elizabeth Warren win that Senate race here.