A Conservative Is A Conservative, Whether He Calls Himself A Republican Or A Democrat And It Doesn't Matter If He Passes Himself Off As A "Moderate"-- They Own All Society's Problems

The two parties aren't "the same." Democrats aren't the same as Republicans. There are some good Democrats. There are no good Republicans. The identity politics Democratic politicians play-- pro-woman, pro-gay, anti-racism, for example-- is better, way better, than the identity politics Republicans play. As for corruption... well corruption is part of, and even lionized by, conservatism. Liberals at least feel guilty about their own corruption, for whatever that's worth.

When he was younger than I am now, my grandfather told me that the only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican. I'd say he hit that one out of the park. A few days ago, The Independent published an OpEd by North Carolina academics Kevin Singer and Alyssa Rockenbach, People worry that 'moderate' Democrats like Joe Biden are the same as Republicans. Our study suggests they may be right. They offered a new set of criteria to look at politicians. It helps explain why there is so much energy around the Republicans for Biden movement right now and so much more enthusiasm from that direction than from progressives, who generally dislike him less than they dislike Trump and will hold their noses and vote for him, deceiving themselves into thinking they will be able to have an impact on his neoliberal agenda after he's in the White House.

Friday, we put together a ritual denunciation of consevative Democrats-- misnamed "moderates" by the media and misguided academics like Singer and Rockenbach-- who had just accepted, and celebrated, endorsements by the very right-wing U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Singer and Rockenbach, though, address the idealization of "moderatism" as the ultimate political virtue. "When it comes to addressing climate change," they wrote, "Eric Levitz of New York Magazine argued that 'a major [obstacle] is the tendency of moderate Democrats to mistake their own myopic complacency for heroic prudence.' Political researcher David Adler found that across Europe and North America, centrists are the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its institutions, and the most supportive of authoritarianism. Furthermore, Adler found that centrists are the least supportive of free and fair elections as well as civil rights-- in the United States, only 25 percent of centrists agree that civil rights are an essential feature of democracy. This finding dovetails with observations made by Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from Birmingham Jail: 'I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the… great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Klu Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.' Even Arthur Books, a self-avowed moderate, admits to 'the failure of the mainstream, moderate, progressive formula for how to create a more equal pluralist America,' adding, 'I’m a moderate guy, but the evidence doesn’t support moderation when it comes to racial equity.' That’s all well and good. But what does the data show?"

They reported on a study of beliefs and attitudes of college students across the country (IDEALS) and found that "as America battles a global pandemic and an economic collapse and reckons with systemic racism, IDEALS suggests that moderate men may be the least likely to make a positive difference. When broken down by political leaning, IDEALS found that moderate male students in their senior year were time and again the least likely, or among the least likely, to somewhat or strongly agree with the following statements":

Strikingly, in almost every case, the responses of moderate men are very similar to conservative men and women. Their level of agreement with the statements above is as much as 14 percent lower than moderate women, who are more likely than men to lean Democratic, or liberal men and women.

This IDEALS finding is on par with a recent Gallup study encompassing over 29,000 interviews with American adults, which revealed that moderates and conservatives remain closely aligned in their ideological preferences.

This raises important questions heading into the election: Is a moderate male candidate a bait-and-switch for Democratic voters? Are they actually casting their votes for a conservative?

That moderate men most resemble Republicans has been confirmed, of all places, on dating apps. Brittany Wong of HuffPost writes, “It’s almost become a coastal cliche at this point: If someone lists their political views as ‘moderate’ on a dating app, the thinking goes, go ahead and assume the person is a conservative.” One interviewee noted, “It’s just in my experience, even ‘moderate’ guys tend to have extremely different views on topics that matter to me, like gun control, women’s reproductive rights and immigration.” Sometimes, moderate men who appear to bend liberal turn out to be “faux woke,” according to one interviewee who was initially attracted to someone whose profile featured photos at a women’s march. Eventually “he slowly started to drop his facade,” revealing behaviors inconsistent with his professed political beliefs.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has grown increasingly frustrated with moderate Democrats during her tenure, saying at a recent event, “The Democratic Party is not a left party. The Democratic Party is a center or a center-conservative party.” Her [ex] chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, recently deleted a tweet comparing two moderate Democrat coalitions-- consisting mostly of men-- to Southern Democrats who favored segregation and opposed civil rights. During this election cycle, a recurring criticism of Vice President Biden has been his record on school desegregation.

To be sure, Vice President Biden also aligns with more progressive Democrats on key policy issues, prompting Paul Waldman of the Washington Post to assert, “Biden is getting more progressive in substance, yet it has done nothing to change his image as a moderate.”

Nevertheless, Biden’s popularity among Republicans has grown consistently in recent months. A number of prominent former GOP officials, and even some of Trump’s ex-staffers, have voiced their support for Biden, including former Governor John Kasich and former Senator Jeff Flake. Their support, however, seems less driven by the good things they believe Biden will do, and more by the bad things they believe Biden won’t do. In his speech at the Democratic National Convention, for example, Kasich remarked that Republicans and Independents may fear that Biden will “turn sharp left and leave them behind,” but assured viewers, “I don't believe that.”

Let's take San Diego City Council president Georgette Gómez, a congressional candidate-- running for an open seat being contested by an hereditary multimillionaire conservative Democrat-- as an example. Gómez has been endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, while the Wall Street-owned and operated New Dem Caucus has embraced and endorsed her opponent, Sara Jacobs, granddaughter of mega-GOP donor Irwin Jacobs, whose money is largely financing her campaign against Gómez. Jacobs stands for nothing at all except getting elected. In the primary, she pretended to be a progressive-- a laugh-- and now she is showing her true colors as another corporate suck-up, opposing everything and anything that will help working families.

Technically, The Move To End Women's Choice Is Bipartisan-- Thanks To Two DCCC Blue Dogs

Dan Lipinksi (IL) and Collin Peterson (MN), two of the scumbag Blue Dogs whose reelection protection Cheri Bustos has made her life’s work, joined over two hundred women-hating Republican fanatics-- 166 in the House and 39 senators-- in signing the amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to outlaw women’s Choice by overturning Roe v Wade. And you laughed when we pointed out that Lipinski could well be the next Blue Dog to join his pal Jeff Van Drew in leaving the Democratic Party for the GOP? Peterson has already announced he’s too old to switch parties in the twilight of his career, but Lipinski is evasive about his plans, especially if-- as many people think-- he’s beaten in the March primary by progressive activist Marie Newman.

On Thursday morning, Newman told Chicagoland voters that “Lipinski’s decision to sign this amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade is further proof of his willingness to pursue a distorted personal agenda and extreme views at the expense of his constituents’ health and best interests. My opponent does not trust women and he is not fit to represent us. Congressman Lipinski refuses to stand up for the values of our community and it is time that our district has real leadership.”

Lipinski, co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, has co-sponsored 54 bills attacking the right to choose, including bills sponsored by Mike Pence, Steve King, and Todd Akin. He co-sponsored legislation to require invasive ultrasounds before women receive an abortion and he voted against a measure to create an exemption to an abortion ban for when the life of the mother was at risk. Trump personally thanked him for his work supporting the movement to take away a woman’s right to choose at an anti-abortion dinner in 2018. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case March 4, just 2 weeks before the Illinois primary.

The case will be the first anti-Choice attempt to overthrow Roe v Wade since Trump appointed two anti-Choice fanatics, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh-- to the Supreme Court. Charles Pierce, writing for Esquire Thursday, noted that this is a problem America has with Republicans, not just with Trump. “In case you were wondering,” wrote Pierce, “if simply replacing the president will be enough to wring the extremism out of the Republican Party, think again… This is going for broke. This is about tossing the privacy rights of 51 percent of the American people overboard. They want abortions made illegal, every one of them. Critical to their argument is the notion that the protocol set down in Roe is ‘unworkable.’ Of course, after doctors get shot, clinics get bombed, judicial vandalism, and SLAPP suits fall like iron rain, almost any system will be rendered ‘unworkable.’”

The Fifth Circuit labored to do the best it could with the vague and opaque “undue burden” standard on which the Court has relied since Casey. Amici respectfully suggest that the court’s struggle-- similar to dozens of other courts’ herculean struggles in this area-- illustrates the unworkability of the “right to abortion” found in Roe and the need for the Court to take up the issue of whether Roe and Casey should be reconsidered and, if appropriate, overruled.

“That’s been the whole point all along,” noted Pierce.

Will The Democrats Really Nominate An Anti-Choice Candidate For President? Biden's Been Wrong About EVERYTHING Since The 1970s

In 2008, just as Biden was about the launch another of his 5 or 6 aborted presidential runs, the Texas Monthly asked him-- on video tape (above)-- where he stands on abortion. First words out of his mouth: "It's going to be very difficult [for him as a slimy politician]. I do not view abortion as a choice and a right... I think we should be focussing on how to limit the number of abortions." That's always been his position and that is still his position. "I'm a bit of an odd man out in my party. I do not vote for funding for abortion. I voted against partial birth abortion."

He's such a fucking turd. If my vote was the deciding vote between him and Trump, the worst "president" in history, I'd let the decision remain a tie. Nothing would ever get me to vote for Biden, not in a primary, not in a general. I've hated his guts since the 1970s when I first realized what a racist pile of vomit he was. I was so disappointed Friday when I read that whoever picked which presidential contenders would speak on night one and which would speak on night two had decided to protect Biden from Elizabeth Warren. I guess she'll have too wait and shred him at a future debate.

In 2005, bankruptcy was on the rise and had been for years.

Lawmakers were pondering why, exactly, that was happening-- and what, if anything, they should do about it-- when two future presidential rivals squared off over a bankruptcy overhaul bill that would restrict who could write off their personal debts.

In one corner, Joe Biden-- one of the staunchest Democratic advocates for the bill and a senator from Delaware, home to several large credit card companies. He was also a member of the Judiciary Committee, which was debating the bill.

In the other corner, Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law professor who had fought against this type of bankruptcy overhaul for years and who was on a panel convened for a hearing over the bill.

Their conversation started off with a testy (but weedy) exchange about bankruptcy courts. And it escalated from there, with plenty of interruptions and the occasional barb-- Biden at one point cast Warren's arguments as "mildly demagogic." It ended with a tense dispute over what, exactly, the dispute ought to be.

WARREN: [Credit card companies] have squeezed enough out of these families in interest and fees and payments that never pay down principle.

BIDEN: Maybe should talk about usury rates. That maybe, that's what we should be talking about, not bankruptcy.

WARREN: Senator, I'll be the first. Invite me.

BIDEN: Now, I know you will, but let's call a spade a spade. Your problem with the credit-card companies is usury rates, from your position. It's not about the bankruptcy bill.

WARREN: But Senator, if you're not going to fix that problem, you can't take away the last shred of protection for these families.

BIDEN: OK, I get it. [pause] You're very good, Professor.

It was heated debate with a polite, even charming end-- complete with laughter throughout the hearing room, but the stakes are higher now, with both Warren and Biden potentially poised to share a debate stage.

And while debate over a 14-year-old bankruptcy bill might otherwise be largely forgotten by now, the 2020 presidential election has made the disagreements between Biden and Warren relevant again-- and shows how their exchange over that 2005 bill show up in their current presidential campaign strategies.

With Democrats in the minority in the Senate in 2005, Biden argues he was trying to make a Republican bill better. Warren thought, even then, that it was fundamentally flawed and bad for consumers.

A major question at the heart of the 2005 bankruptcy bill was why bankruptcies were on the rise.

One side-- including Warren and many Democrats-- said it was because people were financially strapped because of major obligations like medical debt, and that credit card companies were exacerbating the problem.

Others-- largely Republicans, but also some Democrats, like Biden-- said that it was a combination of irresponsible spending and a system that made it too easy to apply for bankruptcy, leading to abuse. That abuse, these lawmakers argued, leads to higher costs for other people seeking credit.

The 2005 bill restricted who could discharge their debts via Chapter 7 bankruptcy and also made the process more difficult. It included a means test, in the form of comparing a person's income with their state's median income. The goal, proponents argued, was to make sure that people who could still pay their debts weren't able to unfairly escape their debts, while also ensuring that people who couldn't pay were able to get relief.

The bill also said that a person had to go through credit counseling before obtaining bankruptcy.

Opponents, however, cast bankruptcy as an important financial protection that the legal system provides to people in difficult circumstances. They thought that the bill would make it unduly hard to file, enriching credit card companies in the process. And indeed, as they argued, credit card companies themselves had lobbied for it.

Warren and her fellow opponents also argued that bankruptcy was a women's issue, as single and divorced women were disproportionately represented among bankruptcy filers. Passing this type of reform would therefore disproportionately hurt women and children, they said (an argument that Warren pointedly made in a 2002 Harvard Women's Law Review essay that focuses heavily on Biden).

This was not new legislation. Similar bills had been proposed in Congress several times-- it even reached the Oval Office in the final days of Bill Clinton's presidency, but he declined to sign it.

Biden and Warren had been on opposite sides during that period, as well-- Biden voted for that 2000 bill, and Warren had counseled Hillary Clinton that it would be bad for consumers.

And that was the lay of the land when they met on Capitol Hill.

"This is one of those situations where the current story is not misleading. They were both very key players in this," said David Skeel, professor at the University of Pennsylvania law school and the author of a history of bankruptcy.

"Elizabeth Warren was the most important critic of the legislation, and she spent years fighting it. That's what really first got her into the into the public eye," he said. "And Joe Biden was critically important to passing the legislation because credit card companies are very important to Delaware. And that's where he was coming from."

In the end, the bill passed. And as for the effects, they're complicated. One outcome: The bill included a provision that made obligations like child support and alimony a top priority for debtors to pay off-- which addressed one concern of the bill's opponents.

And another, overarching result: Bankruptcies fell sharply afterward. And that's linked to one other effect of the bill, according to Skeel.

"The biggest effect is that it is now more expensive to file for bankruptcy than it used to be," Skeel said, "because of the the so-called means test that was put into the 2005 amendments that requires that debtors fill out forms to determine whether they would be capable of repaying some of what they owe."

But, crucially, it's not totally clear that that shows a reduction in bankruptcy abuse, he added.

Research on the bill also doesn't hand either side a total win. On the one hand, the reform was associated with lower interest rates on credit cards, as Vox's Matthew Yglesias pointed out in an article on the Warren-Biden debate.

But, Yglesias argued, studies also suggested that the law meant less access to credit and lower credit scores for some borrowers, not to mention a potentially slower bounce back from the Great Recession.

Potential 2020 voters have already had a preview of Warren's attacks on Biden. In 2016, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) attacked Hillary Clinton's vote for a similar 2001 bankruptcy bill-- a vote she took after Warren convinced her it was a bad bill. Sanders used Warren's criticisms as part of his attacks.

Warren talked about her disappointment in a 2004 interview with journalist Bill Moyers:

WARREN: She voted in favor of it.

MOYERS: Why?

WARREN: As Sen. Clinton, the pressures are very different. It's a well-financed industry. You know, a lot of people don't realize that the industry that gave the most money to Washington over the past few years was not the oil industry. It was not pharmaceuticals. It was consumer credit products. Credit card companies have been giving money, and they have influence.

MOYERS: And Mrs. Clinton was one of them as senator.

WARREN: She has taken money from the groups, and more to the point, she worries about them as a constituency.

For her part, Clinton argued that she was able to support the bill because it, at that point, included better protections for women seeking child support and alimony.

That whole dynamic surrounding the law is repeating itself in this election.

"If you talk to many independent voters, they worry that both parties are funded by the same corporate interests," said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has endorsed Warren ahead of 2020. "Elizabeth Warren has been part of the solution trying to re-brand the Democratic Party as being of the people. The credit card fight was just one chapter of that ongoing struggle."

While Warren uses the fight as evidence of her willingness to fight corporations on behalf of everyday Americans, Biden and his supporters frame the bankruptcy bill as evidence of his practicality-- and they also emphasize protections in the bill like those prioritizing child support.

"Sen. Biden, knowing essentially that the bill was likely to make it through a Republican-led Congress to a Republican-controlled White House, really worked hard to make sure that bill protected middle-class families," said Terrell McSweeny, who worked as a Biden staffer just after the bill's passage.

And that plays into a larger narrative from the Biden campaign.

"Folks, I'm going to say something outrageous," he has said. "I know how to make government work. Not because I've talked or tweeted about it, but because I've done it. I've worked across the aisle to reach consensus, to help make government work in the past."

Democratic voters are concerned with far different topics than the bankruptcy bill, like climate change and a health care overhaul.

But then, if both candidates remain key contenders for the nomination-- and if they share a debate stage-- there's a good chance the topic will come up again, as a symbol of the differences between the two candidates.

And while bankruptcy expert Skeel acknowledges that he's not a political strategist, he does have one political prediction based on the Biden-Warren bankruptcy fight.

"It strikes me that one potential implication," he said, "is it's highly unlikely you will see a Democratic ticket with both of them on it."

Lipinski Finds Another Champion Besides Cheri Bustos-- The Editors Of The National Review

On Monday, Vox published a strong piece by Tara Golshan about the establishment Democrats' uncomfortable dilemma over Lipinski: The Democratic Party is protecting one of its last anti-abortion members in a safe blue district. "Lipinski," she reminded her readers, is "one of the last remaining anti-abortion Democrats in the House. He has voted to defund health clinics that offer abortion services, and to ban abortions at 20 weeks. He opposed the Affordable Care Act and its mandate that employers cover birth control. He speaks at the annual March for Life and attends fundraisers for anti-abortion groups."

Marie Newman's primary battle for the seat Lipinski holds is "one of the most competitive Democratic primaries in 2020. And already, Newman is encountering some roadblocks. Though the district leans heavily Democratic, the national party has erected rules to protect incumbents like Lipinski. Newman says she can’t find a pollster who will work for her. Four political consultants have left her campaign because of a policy, made public in April, that the official campaign arm for House Democrats won’t do business with political vendors-- like direct mail companies or political consultants-- that also work for candidates challenging incumbent Democrats. Party superstars like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez oppose the rule; she also managed to topple an incumbent in a primary challenge. But the DCCC isn’t budging. The DCCC says it’s committed to incumbents, a loyalty to dues-paying members, that it believes represent the party’s best chance of keeping control in the House. And the DCCC’s chair, Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, is a big proponent of “big tent” politics. Progressive lawmakers in Congress are still railing against what they see as a “divisive” policy that effectively “blacklists” groups and candidates. The Democratic Party may need ideological diversity to regain national power, but already, Lipinski’s side of the 'big tent' is looking sparse. Newman came within 2,200 votes of beating Lipinski in 2018. She’s running again, already picking up endorsements from progressive groups like Emily’s List and NARAL, as well as from 2020 presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders and Gov. Jay Inslee. In a year when Democrats are newly energized around abortion rights, the Democratic apparatus protecting an anti-abortion candidate in friendly territory is raising eyebrows."

It's not just Bernie and Jay Inslee. Even a relatively conservative senator like Kirsten Gillibrand, once a dues-paying member of Lipinski's right-wing Blue Dog Coalition, has endorsed Newman. If you'd like to help Marie replace Lipinski, please click on the Blue America Primary A Blue Dog thermometer above.

Democrats have tolerated some anti-abortion lawmakers in their coalition, but the numbers are dwindling in a party that’s adopted a pro-woman mantle. Only three sitting House Democrats regularly vote against abortion rights; Lipinski; Rep. Collin Peterson, who represents a conservative Minnesota district; and Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar. Everyone else has moved on the issue or left. Even Joe Biden, the current frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, recently revised his position, saying the ban on using federal funds for abortions, which he used to support, should be overturned.

The issue has taken on new urgency in the 2020 primaries as Republican state legislatures pass stricter abortion laws explicitly designed to be brought before an increasingly conservative Supreme Court and unravel Roe v. Wade. Bustos was pressured into canceling her fundraiser for Lipinski in light of the Alabama state law banning abortions at six weeks, without exceptions for rape and incest.

But in the liberal stronghold of Illinois’s Third Congressional District, the anti-abortion Lipinski family has been in power for nearly 40 years-- first Lipinski’s father, William, held the seat before passing it on to Dan-- and they’re fighting against the current.

Once known for its conservative pockets, the area-- surrounding Midway Airport, which spans parts of Cook and Will counties-- is more diverse both socioeconomically and politically than it once was. It’s younger and middle class; the median age is 37, with a $65,000 household income, according to the most recent census estimates. There’s a growing Latinx population. Sanders beat Hillary Clinton here in 2016 by 8 points. Clinton went on to beat Donald Trump by an even bigger margin. Interestingly, Lipinski, who was a superdelegate in the 2016 elections, pledged his vote to Sanders.

But between Newman and Lipinski, only one has adopted Sanders’s worldview.

“I’m a real Democrat,” Newman likes to tell voters. “To be a real Democrat, you have to believe in the platform,” she said to Vox. She, like Sanders, identifies income inequality as the root cause of American suffering. At a Saturday morning Pet Parade in Chicago’s Garfield Ridge neighborhood, Newman led a procession of staffers and volunteers-- and their dogs-- with signs supporting Medicare-for-all, a $15 minimum wage, and a Green New Deal. Newman supports abortion rights, the Equality Act, and free college and thinks Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be “repealed and replaced.”

...Even Lipinski’s most loyal supporters are beginning to see him as an outsider.

“He had a really close election last time, so what he has to do is find out what the constituents want and sort of modify those positions,” Albert Reiff, a 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran, said. “Like with the women and stuff like that. You’ve got to understand society is more [supportive of] equal wages for equal work, more open-minded with who you can love and stuff like that. He could do it, though. He’s not like Lindsey Graham. He is a moderate.”

At a senior fair in Summit, Illinois, Lipinski was in his element. A group of older constituents, mostly white, many veterans, lined up to share their gripes: Their grandkids were having trouble covering health care bills, the music festival at the local park was too damn loud, the DMV was too confusing. In this community, Lipinski is known for this kind of affair; he regularly holds events for seniors and veterans. His district office is known for getting their concerns taken care of. Reiff said Lipinski’s staff organized his paperwork for the Veterans Affairs hospital and got his Vietnam War medals mailed to his home.

As far as Reiff was concerned, Newman’s insurgency is a “reflection of the millenniums”-- referring to the progressive millennial energy that has boosted candidates like Sanders. Lipinski operates in a different world.

Talking Trump, Lipinski chose his words carefully. According to exit polling, 18 percent of his primary support in 2018 came from Trump supporters. He treaded lightly on impeachment, saying the election was the better way to oust the president, but was undecided in the 2020 presidential primary. He wouldn’t say whether he sees the national outrage around abortion rights playing inside his district.

Like Lipinski, the editors of the National Review never use "anti-Choice" to describe the fanatics who oppose women's Choice. Like Lipinski, they always use "pro-Life." And in their sympathetic response to Vox yesterday, Dan Lipinski: The Last Pro-Life Liberal Democrat they also referred to the ardently conservative Lipinski as a "true liberal." ProgressivePunch rates him a solid "F" and his crucial vote score-- even though fear of Newman has seen him vote somewhat differently in the past 2 years-- is still a repulsive (to liberals) 58.05%. The National Review appears to be dubbing him a "true liberal" because, unlike the two other anti-Choice Dems still left-- Henry Cuellar and Collin Peterson-- he doesn't have an "A" from the NRA like they do.

The eight-term congressman faced his first serious assault from the left in a 2018 primary, when challenger Marie Newman and the energized progressive base came within two percentage points of defeating him. Newman is running again to finish the job in 2020. Taking out Lipinski makes perfect sense to pro-abortion activists: Democrats have no fear of losing a general election in Lipinski’s district, which Hillary Clinton carried by 15 points in 2016 and Barack Obama carried by 13 points in 2012. Yet the anti-Lipinski effort does carry risks for the Democratic party. No single seat in the House is worth very much in terms of political power. The odds are very low that a crucial piece of legislation will advance by a single vote in the House. Purging Lipinski is more about sending a message than it is about gaining one more vote.

The message that the anti-Lipinski campaign is sending is that dissent will not be tolerated and pro-lifers and even those with moderate views on abortion are unwelcome in the Democratic party. Newman’s last campaign even carried a whiff of anti-Catholicism to it. She attacked Lipinski, a practicing Catholic, for believing contraception is morally wrong. Newman falsely suggested Lipinski wanted to ban contraception, when he has in fact voted for federal funding for it but also supports religious-liberty protections.

It says something about the leftward lurch of the Democratic party that it has fallen to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a liberal Democrat from San Francisco, to explain to her colleagues the political peril of purging pro-lifers from the party. “You know what? That’s why Donald Trump is president of the United States-- the evangelicals and the Catholics, anti-marriage-equality, anti-choice. That’s how he got to be president,” Pelosi told the Washington Post in 2017. “Everything was trumped, literally and figuratively, by that.”

“I grew up Nancy D’Alesandro, in Baltimore, Maryland; in Little Italy; in a very devout Catholic family; fiercely patriotic; proud of our town and heritage, and staunchly Democratic,” Pelosi told The Post. “Most of those people-- my family, extended family-- are not pro-choice. You think I’m kicking them out of the Democratic party?”

Pelosi may not want to kick them out of the Democratic party for nakedly partisan reasons. All pro-lifers should hope on principle that Lipinski prevails against the campaign to purge the last Democrats who are willing to defend the right to life.

That was a slick trick Pelosi pulled-- conflating officials of the Democratic Party who can vote in Congress to take away health care from women-- as Lipinski has at every opportunity-- and ordinary voters who are certainly free to call themselves Democrats even if the party is pro-Choice. No one asked Pelosi to kick a bunch of Italian-American voters out of the party. Lipinski-- along with Cuellar and Peterson-- well, that's a different matter.

I asked Marie Newman what she thought of the National Review asserting that Dan Lipinski is somehow "a true liberal." She probably recalled the thousands of texts the Lipinski campaign sent out, in desperation at the end of the 2018 campaign, claiming she wants to "jail nuns." Pretty insane, right? Marie told us that this whole National Review nonsense makes her scratch her head "in disbelief. As a Catholic, I am a true liberal because I am pro-immigrant rights, pro-economic rights and pro-healthcare rights, so clearly, with Dan Lipinksi’s record of voting against immigrants’ rights, voting against Obamacare and recently voting to take away Obamacare from workers (last month’s Republican bill to stop workers who work under 30 hours from receiving Obamacare (HR 2782). Dan is not a true Liberal. Further, I never said Dan Lipinski wanted to ban contraception, I merely repeated what he has said many times. [Lipinski has stated several times in front of large groups, he voted against Obamacare because it had contraception in the bill.] To be clear, I am running with the district to fight for Everybody’s Everyday: 1. Healthcare for all, 2. Fighting Income Inequality and 3. Addressing the Climate Crisis. Dan is running against those issues. Finally to suggest I am anti-Catholic is beyond disrespectful to my family and specifically, to those members of my family who are Catholic faith leaders."

Status Quo Joe's Opposition To Roe v Wade And To Brown v Board Of Education

God forbid

Yesterday, we took a look at the potential of Democratic primary voters making the fatal error of nominating an anti-Choice corporate conservative to go up against Trump. Wetalked mostly about Biden's decades-long support for the hideously discriminatory Hyde Amendment. Ryan Grim, over at The Intercept dug into another aspect of Biden's anti-Choice posture-- his more recent determination to undermine Obamacare's coverage of contraception. "As vice president," wrote Grim, "Joe Biden repeatedly sought to undermine the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, working in alliance with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to push for a broad exemption that would have left millions of women without coverage. Biden’s battle over contraception is a window into his approach to the politics of reproductive freedom, a function of an electoral worldview that centers working-class Catholic men over the interests of women. The issue has been causing his presidential campaign some discomfort-- on Wednesday, Biden’s campaign clarified that he remains a supporter of the so-called Hyde Amendment, a provision that bars federal money from being used to fund reproductive health services. Biden had recently told an activist with the American Civil Liberties Union that he opposed the amendment, and wanted to see it repealed."

Grim doesn't discuss the marked propensity of Biden to lie as though he still lives in the 1950s, when lies were not as easily fact-checked and exposed as they are today. And while Biden doesn't lie as much as Trump, PolitiFact finds he and Trump are in another world of deceitful assholes and gaslighters compared to any of the other Democratic candidates.

On contraception, according to contemporaneous reporting and sources involved with the internal debate, Biden had argued that if the regulations implementing the Affordable Care Act were going to mandate coverage, it would have angered white, male, Catholic voters, and threatened Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012. Biden’s main ally in the internal fight over contraception was chief of staff William Daly; both men are Catholic.

Opposing Biden was a faction of mostly women advisers, joined by some men, who argued that Biden had both the policy and the politics wrong. On policy, they noted that if his broad exemption went into effect, upwards of 6 million women who happened to be employed by religious-affiliated organizations would lose contraception coverage. The politics were just as bad, they argued, given that women were increasingly becoming central to the party’s success. To turn on them on the issue of access to birth control-- embracing a fringe position not even adopted by most Catholics who aren’t bishops-- would put that support at risk.

Biden has long said that he is personally opposed to abortion, but supports the legal right. His support of Roe v. Wade has not always been full-throated.

“When it comes to issues like abortion, amnesty, and acid, I’m about as liberal as your grandmother,” Biden said in a June 1974 article. “I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”

Because Biden’s anti-Roe comments came so long ago-- more than four decades-- some have argued they are of little value in gauging his current politics. But his battle against contraception, and his unwillingness to join the bulk of the Democratic field and call for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, puts him dramatically out of step with today’s party.

Biden is so out of step, in fact, that when he was shown polling data during the contraception fight, he dismissed it as inaccurate. He has a view of the American electorate’s politics on abortion that can’t be influenced by new facts. Jake Tapper, then reporting for ABC News, reported in February 2012:

The two sides couldn’t even agree about what they were debating. In the fall, [Planned Parenthood head Cecile] Richards brought in polling indicating that the American people overwhelmingly supported the birth control benefit in health insurance. She also highlighted statistics showing the overwhelming use of birth control.



The Vice President and others argued that this wouldn’t be seen as an issue of contraception-- it would be seen as an issue of religious liberty. They questioned the polling of the rule advocates, arguing that it didn’t explain the issue in full, it ignored the question of what religious groups should have to pay for. And they argued that women voters for whom this was an important issue weren’t likely to vote for Mitt Romney, who has drawn a strong anti-abortion line as a presidential candidate, saying he would end federal funding to Planned Parenthood and supporting a “personhood” amendment that defines life as beginning at the moment of fertilization.

...In his vice presidential debate with Mitt Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, Biden attempted to portray it as a broad exemption. “No religious institution-- Catholic or otherwise, including Catholic social services, Georgetown hospital, Mercy hospital, any hospital-- none has to either refer contraception, none has to pay for contraception, none has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact,” Biden said in the debate.

In a rare public disagreement with Biden, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops shot back with a statement, accurately saying that Biden’s claim was “not a fact.” Indeed, many religious-affiliated entities that had hoped to win an exemption, and which had Biden’s support inside the White House, had failed. But with Biden now a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president, they may get another shot at denying access to contraception to their employees.

A dead giveaway to when Biden is trying to deceive his audience is when he says "That is a fact." That usually how he gives away the actual fact-- that he's lying. As PolitiFact discovered over the years, Biden lies far more than even most politicians (other than Trump, of course. But Trump is too low a bar for people who expect a public official to be basically truthful and ethical.

Another topic Biden tries to avoid these days-- but which Trump will not allow him to if he wins the nomination-- is his racism, the issue in the 1970s that first turned me against an upcoming right-wing Democratic politician-- and piece of shit-- from Delaware. I've watched Biden since the early '70s and never had a moments doubt that he is and has always been a vile, repulsive racist. Obama, for his own reasons, did a lot to lift that onus from Biden and many Democrats who pine for another Obama term mistakenly think Biden is another Obama. He certainly isn't. Yesterday, The Nation published an important piece by Jonathan Kozol, Joe Biden Once Made Common Cause With School Segregationists. We've talked about how Biden got his political start-- as a fighter against racial integration-- but let's look at how Kozol framed the issue, important because today Biden's top demographic support is coming from African-American women who didn't go to college and are over the age of 60.

Advocates for children and civil rights who have not yet given up entirely on the struggle to break down the walls of racial isolation in our public schools may want to take a good hard look at Joe Biden’s shameful record on school segregation. Despite his recent effort to allay concerns about that record, it cannot be expunged, nor easily forgiven.

In an education-policy proposal released by his campaign on May 28, Biden briefly spoke of encouraging diversity by giving grants and guidance to districts that are willing to pursue it. But he said nothing to disown his lengthy history as a fierce opponent of school busing and a scathing critic of the Warren Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

“We’ve lost our bearings since the 1954 Brown v. School Board desegregation case,” Biden said in 1975, in an interview that he gave to a newspaper in Delaware that was recently unearthed by the Washington Post. “To ‘desegregate’ is different than to ‘integrate.’”

In the interview, which captured an early unfiltered Biden, today’s Democratic front-runner picked through a grab bag of anti-integration canards to make his case against busing-- among them, the idea that a school where children of different races or multiple ethnicities sit in class together is doomed to be inferior. “The real problem with busing,” Biden said, “is that you take [white] people who aren’t racist, people who are good citizens, who believe in equal education and opportunity, and you stunt their children’s growth by busing them to an inferior school.” For Biden, it seems, the “stunting” of black children’s growth in the savagely unequal and deliberately segregated public schools I’ve been describing for years did not elicit the same sense of alarm.

Nor did Biden stop there. With bald disregard for centuries of American history, he said, “I do not buy the concept, popular in the ‘60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and…in order to even the score, we must now give the black man”-- no reference to black women-- ”a head start or even hold the white man back.… I don’t buy that.”

He concluded, “I oppose busing. It’s an asinine concept, the utility of which has never been proven to me. I’ve gotten to the point where I think our only recourse to eliminate busing may be a constitutional amendment.”

Crucially, Biden didn’t just talk the anti-busing talk. He also took a leading role in fighting what he called “unnecessary busing” by pushing bills that would have forced the federal government to consider “other” ways of equalizing education-- ways that would not have required what old-fashioned bigots used to call race-mixing. In a series of letters, recently released by CNN, that Biden wrote to Dixiecrat Senator James Eastland in 1977, he expressed his thanks to Eastland for supporting anti-busing legislation he had introduced.

“I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help…in attempting to bring my anti-busing legislation to a vote,” he wrote the Mississippi Democrat, a virulent opponent of civil rights who frequently referred to black people as “an inferior race.”

Biden, moreover, did not simply reinforce the efforts of Southern segregationists. He also took a decisive role in fueling opposition to desegregation efforts in the Northern states and providing Northern liberals with a convenient rationale for joining him in these attempts. In a stunning piece of reportage in Politico in 2015, historian Jason Sokol surfaced Biden’s argument that busing children for the sake of integration was an insult to black people because, he said, it implies that they “have no reason to be proud of…their own culture” and cannot learn unless they’re sitting next to a white child. By dragging out this old and wrinkled chestnut, Biden sought to turn the tables on Senate integrationists.

Biden also argued that de facto segregation in the Northern cities, unlike de jure segregation in the South, could not be held to justify court-ordered busing programs, because there was no evidence that it was the consequence of governmental practices. In depicting Northern segregation as a matter of mere demographic happenstance and denying that it was occasioned by political intention, “Biden’s logic,” according to Sokol, “allowed the political center-left to coalesce around [his] brand of opposition” to school busing.

Senator Ed Brooke, a liberal Republican who served two Senate terms representing Massachusetts and was the sole black member of the Senate at the time, was outraged by Biden’s stance. “Perhaps,” says Sokol, “Brooke foresaw the new political consensus that would take shape in the ensuing decades: Liberals would pay homage to the civil rights movement and its dream of integration, but refrain from championing the legislation that would make the dream a reality.”

Biden has made no apologies for his willingness to rip apart the final remnants of the legacy of Brown at a seminal moment in our nation’s history. As The Washington Post candidly surmised, Biden’s “decision to stand by his views on the issue illustrates what some of his supporters think would be his advantage in the 2020 field: his ability to appeal beyond his Democratic base to some white working-class voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.” This may seem “smart strategy” to some. But it reeks of cynical contempt for social-justice values, even if his strategists attempt to dress it up as nothing more than shrewd consensus-building.

Like other careful centrists, Biden threads the needle on the subject of diversity by saying that he favors it in principle, even in the face of his decades-long resistance to letting children climb onto a bus in order to achieve it. This is simply doublespeak. In a nation in which residential segregation and unabated patterns of red-lining have guaranteed the seemingly eternal sequestration of black and Hispanic children in poorly funded schools within their own communities, Biden’s many years of strident opposition to letting children ride the good old yellow bus represent a throwback to the age of Plessy v. Ferguson.

All over America, every morning, we see the blinking lights of the yellow bus that’s picking up school children. At 2 or 3 pm, we see the lights again as the bus returns the children to their neighborhood, the departing kids waving to their friends. Some of those buses, unbeknownst to Biden apparently, are bringing children of color out of virtual-apartheid schooling districts into richly funded schools in affluent communities.

My longtime friend and co-worker in civil rights in Boston, Julia Walker, 86, whose kids and grandkids rode the bus from inner-city Boston to well-funded suburban schools, thanks to an inter-district integration program that she helped to fight for starting more than 50 years ago, looked at Biden’s language and made the observation that activists for civil rights have made for many decades: “It’s not the bus. It’s the color of the children that it’s bringing to your neighborhood.”

The program Walker and other activists and leaders in Boston’s black community struggled to make possible, known as METCO, is the longest-running program of its kind in the nation. It serves more than 3,000 children who ride the bus to more than 30 suburbs and have a graduation rate of approximately 95 percent. It’s always had its critics among those who share Joe Biden’s views, but not among the thousands of black families whose kids have been on waiting lists to get into the program, and not among the many teachers like myself (I taught in the program for two years) who have seen its students go on to higher education and then into professional careers or leadership positions in the business world.

Several of the children whom I came to know in the first years of the program later became teachers, and frequently the first black teachers, in the same school districts they’d attended or other districts in the Boston area, and helped to build the structures of multicultural support that are essential features of good integration programs. An enlightened nation would not turn its back on this kind of program but would see it, for all its imperfections, as a realistic model for a more extensive metro-wide desegregation effort in which no kids of color are left to sit on waiting lists until their childhood is over and their parents’ dreams of equal education have been lost forever.

Bitterly enough, the tide seems to be heading in the opposite direction. Political elites in Massachusetts, instead of working to expand the program, have frozen it for several decades at its present level, while many programs like it elsewhere in the nation have been phased out altogether. A president who champions school desegregation, with no reservations about the only present way in which to make it possible, could reignite the sense of ethical imperative that inspired programs such as METCO more than half a century ago. Biden is not likely to be that kind of president.

Unlike Bernie Sanders, who recently proposed a “Thurgood Marshall Plan” for public education that calls for a renewal and expansion of desegregation plans by means of transportation, Biden still believes his original position was correct and, according to one of his aides, Bill Russo, sees no reason to revise it. No matter how he tries to blur the edges of his past or present-day beliefs, no matter how he waffles in his language in order to present himself as some kind of born-again progressive, Biden has not shown that he can be trusted to confront our nation’s racist past and one of its most urgent present needs.

As the mainstream media repeatedly remind us, Biden is a likable man in many ways: even his critics often speak about his graciousness. But Biden’s likability will not help Julia Walker’s grandkids and her “great-grands” and the children of her neighbors to go to schools where they can get an equal shot at a first-rate education and where their young white classmates have a chance to get to know and value them, and learn from them, as children do in ordinary ways, when we take away the structures that divide them.

Biden will probably always be the lesser of two evils when it comes to Trump. But Democratic primary voters who want to see Trump defeated would be fools to gamble on someone like Biden who will be such an easy target for Republicans and Russians when it comes to holding down Democratic base turnout.

Did The Damn Just Crack On The Biden Campaign? Will Democrats Nominate A Compulsive Liar AND An Anti-Choice Candidate?

Many in Congress are concerned about Trump's seriously deteriorating mental health. And, at the same time, according to polling released yesterday by Pew Research more Americans identify fake news as a bigger problem for America than terrorism, illegal immigration, racism and sexism. They reported that 68% of those polled said made-up news and information greatly impacts Americans’ confidence in government institutions, and over half (54%) said it is having a major impact on our confidence in each other. Yesterday, Paul Farhi reported for the Washington Post that "It’s (almost) official: The president of the United States is a liar." Mainstream news organizations are finally waking up and smelling the plastic roses. Until fairly recently the media has by and large shied away from branding Trump’s gaslighting and bullshit as outright lies. "Nowadays," wrote Farhi, "many in the news media are no longer bothering to grant Trump the benefit of the doubt. In routine news and feature stories, Trump’s dishonesty carries no fig leaf. It is described baldly."

At a time like this-- although in my mind, any time-- it would be a dangerous risk for the Democrats to nominate someone like Joe Biden to run against Trump. As we've mentioned before, although PolitiFact has found that Trump has lied in 84% of his public statements-- making him the world's biggest liar-- Biden's record of lying and deceiving people is completely unacceptable in any way other than not being as bad as Trump's. Overall, Biden has had a very long and repulsive political career and he's one of the worst liars in politics-- with a horrifying 61% of public statements being lied. Compared to Trump-- not so bad, compared to anyone else: unacceptable!

How much do politicians lie? According to PolitiFact:

• Rush Limbaugh- 94% (Half true- 12%)
• Trump- 84% (Half true- 14%)
• Kevin McCarthy- 80% (Half true- 36%)
• Ted Cruz- 77% (Half true- 14%)
• Pelosi- 76% (Half true- 29%)
• Pence- 68% (Half true- 30%)
• Mitt Romney- 68% (Half true- 28%)
• Lindsey Graham- 67% (Half True- 33%)
• Sean Hannity- 67% (Half true- 17%)
• Schumer- 63% (Half true- 21%)
• Biden- 61% (Half true- 29%)
• Dick Cheney- 61% (Half true- 12%)
• McTurtle- 60% (Half true- 18%)
• Beto- 53% (Half true- 32%)
• Obama- 51% (Half true-26%)
• Bernie- 51% (Half true- 24%)
• Rachel Maddow- 50% (Half True- 14%)
• Elizabeth Warren- 47% (Half true- 47%)
• Cory Booker- 42% (Half true- 14%)
• Kamala Harris- 37% (Half true- 14%)

And that brings us to the controversial Hyde Amendment-- a disgraceful piece of legislation targeted at poor women... but just another important piece of policy Biden is lying about. Yesterday. Jodi Jacobson, editor of Rewire News wrote that "Biden's campaign confirmed to NBC News that the candidate supports the Hyde Amendment, an anti-choice restriction banning federal funding for abortion care."

Less than a month ago, at a campaign event, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) volunteer approached Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to ask whether he would commit to abolishing the Hyde Amendment, which denies public funding of abortions to women who can’t afford them.

“Will you commit to abolishing the Hyde Amendment, which hurts poor women and women of color?” she asked.

“Yes,” Biden said unequivocally. “Yes.”

To be honest, watching the clip at the time made me wonder if Biden really even knew what he was saying. He had what appeared to me to be a quizzical and unfocused expression on his face, suggesting he was not clear what the volunteer was asking. Biden’s first response was to tell the woman about his “near-perfect” voting record according to the ACLU.

But the volunteer did not let him get away with that, and she persisted, saying to him, “I heard you did [have a good record]. but I am so glad said you would commit to abolishing the Hyde Amendment.”

“No, no,” he replied. “It has to be … it can’t stay.”

Apparently, Biden either did not understand the question, did not remember what the Hyde Amendment is, or did not know his own campaign position.

Today, NBC’s Heidi Przybyla writes, Biden’s campaign “confirmed to NBC News that Biden still supports the Hyde Amendment, a four-decade-old ban on using federal funds for abortion services, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the woman”

“Biden’s continued support for Hyde not only sets him apart from the rest of his 2020 Democratic competitors,” Przybyla writes, “but it may surprise progressive groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, which promoted a recent tweet by one of its activists appearing to get Biden to commit to ending Hyde during a rope-line exchange in South Carolina. Biden’s campaign told NBC he would be open to repealing Hyde if abortion avenues currently protected under Roe were threatened.”

Biden’s position on Hyde puts him out of step with the national party, which officially committed to abolishing the anti-choice restriction in its platform for the first time in 2016.

So before the first debate, and after months of waiting for him to get into the presidential race, we now know that Biden’s campaign is, to be kind, not ready for primetime.

Meanwhile, most of the other Democratic candidates have already come out for repealing the Hyde Amendment, leaving Biden isolated on an issue he and his campaign team were hoping would never be raised:

• Bernie
• Elizabeth Warren
• Jay Inslee
• Beto
• Gillibrand
• Steve Bullock
• Eric Swalwell
• Tim Ryan
• Julian Castro
• Cory Booker
• Amy Klobuchar
• Marianne Williamson

Yesterday, The Hill confirmed that Biden was lying to the ACLU volunteer when he told her he backs repealing the Hyde Amendment and that he has never changed his position backing the amendment.

Truth is, Biden has not been a friend of Choice and women should think long and hard about voting for him in a primary with so many candidates who are so much better. The Hyde Amendment is an anti-Choice smokescreen that progressive have not backed and do not back this abomination. NARAL President Ilyse Hogue: "That position is unjust and discriminatory and endangers women and families." Kelly Robinson, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund: "The unfair Hyde Amendment makes it so that those who have the least end up having to pay the most to access abortion, and those who are service members or live on reservations are often left with no coverage for abortion care. We encourage any candidate who doesn't recognize Hyde's impact to speak to the women it hurts most-- particularly on women of color and women with low incomes-- to learn more about the harmful impacts of this discriminatory policy."

Biden himself is "a devout Roman Catholic who opposes abortion" on a personal level. He has grudgingly backed most pro-Choice positions but Hydge is the biggie and he's definitely on the wrong side of that one-- and knows enough to lie right in women's faces about it when he's confronted. In 1981 he voted to remove rape and incest exceptionsts in pending legislation and he voted several times to prohibit federal workers from using health insurance on abortion services, with the only exception being to save the life of the mother.

Yesterday the Trumpist regime announced that the federal government would sharply curtail federal spending on medical research that uses tissue from aborted fetuses-- fulfilling a top goal of anti-abortion groups that have lobbied hard for it. Meanwhile, scientists say the tissue is crucial for studies that benefit millions of patients. I know where most of the Democratic candidates stand on this, but where would Biden come down? Who knows? Given his long, putrid record, it's too dangerous to take any chances with this guy. The Blue America backed progressive candidate, Mike Seagel, running in a red-leaning, gerrymandered Texas district, is clear and to the point and no one has to try to guess about where he stands on women's Choice: "The Hyde Amendment is killing women," he told us yesterday, "predominantly women of color and working class Americans. Repealing the Hyde Amendment is essential to combatting the maternal mortality crisis in Texas and across this country."

Blue America's most recent endorsed candidate, Kathy Ellis, isn't shying away from calling a spade a spade because of anti-Choice sentiment in south east Missouri. "The Hyde Amendment," she told us, "prevents people from accessing the medical care they need. In my state of Missouri, we have seen first-hand how restrictive, anti-abortion laws put peoples' lives and health at risk. I fully support the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, and I fully oppose the restrictive anti-abortion laws we see popping up across the country."

Eva Putzova is running for seat held by a Republican, Tom O'Halleran, who now calls himself a Blue Dog Democrat. Unlike O'Halleran, she is a form supporter of Choice. "I support reproductive choice for all women," she told us yesterday, "including the right to abortion. The Hyde amendment punishes mostly poor women and women of color who are the primary recipients of Medicaid and other government programs. The Democratic Party national platform calls for the repeal of the Hyde amendment, and when I am elected to Congress I will work tirelessly with my colleagues to repeal it. We can't say that we support a woman's right to choose in theory, yet effectively prohibit it for women who can't afford it."

All of the candidates we've been talking to-- men/women, white/black, rural/urban, senior/junior... they all feel very strongly about ending repealing the Hyde Amendment. Michael Owens, attorney and Democratic Party activist, is running in the suburbs south and west of Atlanta in a deep blue district occupied by a conservative Blue Dog, David Scott. Michael told us that he continues "to believe unequivocally, like the majority of Americans, that every woman should have access to quality reproductive health care services. The Hyde Amendment directly impedes on a woman's access to abortion. Furthermore, it marginalizes women of color, and those without substantial financial means by making it more difficult to access reproductive health services for over 15.6 million women in the United States, including 1 in 5 women of reproductive age. This is no more important than here in Georgia where we women face the highest maternal mortality rate in the country and our our Governor just signed a 'forced-birth' bill that will make a women seeking abortion a crime."

Dary Rezvani is the progressive Democrat taking on Devin Nunes this time around. He's in his late 20s and never remembers a time when women didn't have the right to Choice over their own bodies. Last time around, Central Valley Democrats lost with a centrist Democrat who was fundamentally uncomfortable with progressive issues and causes. Dary is the opposite. "The government," he told me last night, "shouldn't be telling women what they can and can't do with their health choices, their bodies. Trust women! Trust women! Trust women! That means... trust women. The Hyde Amendment was a mistake in 1976 when Congress decided, arbitrarily, that Medicaid can't be used by women for a perfectly legal health decision. It was a way for a body made up almost entirely of men to get around Roe v Wade. It should have been thrown out long ago and I'll work with women's groups towards doing just that if voters in Fresno and Tulare counties decide to replace Devin Nunes with me."

Elizabeth Warren, during an MSNBC town hall in Indiana last night, said Biden was wrong to support the abortion funding restriction. "Women of means will still have access to abortions," Warren said. "Who won’t will be poor women, will be working women, will be women who can’t afford to take off three days from work." Meanwhile, Beto was on CBS news suggesting Biden is senile: "I hope that Joe Biden rethinks his position. Perhaps he doesn’t have all the facts. Perhaps he doesn’t understand who the Hyde Amendment hurts the most." But in his 2007 book, Promises to Keep, Biden wrote: "‘I’ve stuck to my middle-of-the-road position on abortion for more than 30 years. I still vote against partial birth abortion and federal funding, and I’d like to make it easier for scared young mothers to choose not to have an abortion, but I will also vote against a constitutional amendment that strips a woman of her right to make her own choice."