Pelosi's 180-- She's Now What Gephardt Was When She Took Over The House Leadership-- Head Of The Republican Wing Of The Party

So far, the senators who have signed on as cosponsors to Bernie's Medicare-For-All bill are Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Kamala Harris (D-CA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Ed Markey (D-MA), Tom Udall (D-NM), Pat Leahy (D-VT), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Al Franken (D-MN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT)-- 15, so, with Bernie, that's 16 out of the 48 Democrats in the Senate. Bernie will make his formal announcement at 2pm (ET)-- in one hour. You can watch it live-streamed here.

According to a poll by the Pew Research Center earlier this summer, support for "single payer" health care has continued growing, driven largely by efforts by Democrats. 60% of Americans agree that "it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage" while just 39% say this is not the government’s responsibility.

Among those who see a government responsibility to provide health coverage for all, more now say it should be provided through a single health insurance system run by the government, rather than through a mix of private companies and government programs. Overall, 33% of the public now favors such a “single payer” approach to health insurance, up 5 percentage points since January and 12 points since 2014. Democrats-- especially liberal Democrats-- are much more supportive of this approach than they were even at the start of this year.

...The issue of the government’s responsibility in ensuring health coverage remains deeply divisive politically, according to the new survey, conducted June 8-18 among 2,504 adults. More than eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (85%) say that this responsibility falls to the federal government, while about two-thirds of Republicans and Republican leaners (68%) say it does not.

Still, most Republicans (57%) say the government “should continue programs like Medicare and Medicaid for seniors and the very poor.” Just 9% of Republicans say the government should not be involved in providing health insurance at all.

Among Democrats, 52% now say health insurance should be provided through a single national insurance system run by the government, while fewer (31%) say it should be provided through a mix of private companies and government programs. The share of Democrats supporting a single national program to provide health insurance has increased 9 percentage points since January and 19 points since 2014.

Nearly two-thirds of liberal Democrats (64%) now support a single-payer health insurance system, up 13 percentage points since January. Conservative and moderate Democrats remain about evenly divided: 38% prefer that health insurance continue to be provided by a mix of private insurance companies and government programs, while 42% favor a single-payer approach.

Overall, support for a single-payer health insurance system is much greater among younger adults than older people. Two-thirds of adults younger than 30 (67%) say the government has a responsibility to provide health coverage for all, with 45% saying coverage should be provided through a single national program.

Tuesday, Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat running for reelection next year in Wisconsin, a state Trump won, wrote an OpEd in the state's #1 newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Why I support Medicare for all and other efforts to expand health coverage. "When it comes to providing affordable health care for every American," she wrote, "there is more we must do right now to change the status quo, improve our health care system and lower costs. That is why I have introduced bipartisan legislation with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the FAIR Drug Pricing Act, to take on sky-high prescription drug costs by holding drug companies accountable for price hikes. I also am working across party lines on bipartisan solutions to stabilize the insurance marketplace, reduce families’ health costs and get more people covered. We must act now to stabilize and strengthen the individual market to help Americans buy insurance at more affordable prices for 2018."

Before the Affordable Care Act, families weren’t protected against being denied coverage or charged more because of a past illness. Today, insurance companies can no longer discriminate against someone based on their pre-existing condition. I championed the health reform that allows young people to stay on their parents’ insurance plans up to age 26. These reforms have led to millions more Americans having the health insurance they need. We have made great progress in making things better.

However, we have more work to do, and Washington has been consumed by a debate this year over partisan attempts to make things worse.

Congressional Republicans have offered a number of repeal plans that would increase the number of people who are uninsured and force many families to pay more for less care.

The people of Wisconsin did not send me to Washington to take people’s health care away, so I fought against these repeal plans. Instead of making things worse, I believe we should move forward to expand coverage and make health care more affordable, not more costly.

Every American should have affordable health coverage, and there is more we can do to make that a reality. I always have believed that our goal must be universal health care coverage for everyone, and my support for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All legislation being introduced this week is a statement of that belief.

With this reform, we would simplify a complicated system for families and reduce administrative costs for businesses. It would expand coverage to all the uninsured, make health care more affordable for working, middle-class families and reduce growing prescription drug costs for taxpayers.

This reform will help us achieve universal coverage for everyone and is one of many paths we can take to expand coverage and lower health care costs. Last month, I helped introduce the Medicare at 55 Act, which would provide an option for people between the ages of 55 and 64 to buy into Medicare. I am working with Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) to soon introduce legislation to allow states to offer people a choice to buy into the Medicaid program. This would grant more Wisconsinites the opportunity to enroll in our popular BadgerCare program. And Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) is working on a reform that would provide all Americans, individuals and companies with a public option to purchase Medicare.

What all of these proposals have in common is a commitment to the belief that every American deserves affordable health coverage. If both parties look past the partisan debate in Washington, we can find common ground today on solutions that work for the American people.

It is time to move forward.

Forward toward the day when we make good on the guarantee of high quality, affordable health care coverage for every American. That is a goal worth reaching, and, as Americans, we shouldn’t let anyone tell us we can’t.

Pelosi, on the other hands, continues to crap on her own legacy and once again, feels compelled to take the side of the reactionaries and conservatives in her dysfunctional caucus. She's running around like a chicken without a head muttering about how single payer healthcare is not a litmus test. Funny, her DCCC seems to be using it as a reverse litmus test as they continue recruiting Blue Dogs, "ex"-Republicans, self-funding multimillionaires and lottery winners who are 100% out of touch with the energy of the Democratic base.

I often sit and talk with tepid progressives who want to back Medicare-For-All but are afraid their districts' voters won't understand it or support it. Life's a bitch and explaining it and persuading them to understand it is part of a political leader's job. It's worth the effort. But some Democratic politicians want nothing to do with it at all... conservatives who will work with the Republicans to kill it, the way Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor and Max Baucus-- none of whom are in public office any longer-- worked so hard to kill the public option. Pelosi and Hoyer have refused to co-sponsor Medicare-For-All, nor have most of the conservative shitheads in the Democratic Caucus, like Schumer's two horrid Senate picks, Blue Dog Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) and Jacky Rosen (NV). Pelosi's anti-single payer position is, according to The Post "the latest evidence that Democrats in the House are willing to ignore pressure from liberal factions aiming to drive the party further to the left." The "liberal factions," I suppose, are the 117 House Dems who have already signed on as co-sponsors to John Conyers' H.R. 676-- including conservative allies of Pelosi's like Joe Crowley (New Dem-NY), Adam Schiff (New Dem-CA), Darren Soto (New Dem-FL), Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN), Luis Correa (Blue Dog-CA) and Gene Green (TX).

“I don’t think it’s a litmus test,” Pelosi said in an interview. “What we want is to have as many people as possible, everybody, covered, and I think that’s something that we all embrace.”

Pelosi said that she would like a variety of health-care ideas to be vetted and analyzed by budget scorekeepers but that she thinks none of them will succeed while the ACA is under attack from Republicans.

“Right now I’m protecting the Affordable Care Act,” Pelosi said. “None of these things, whether it’s Bernie’s or others, can really prevail unless we protect the Affordable Care Act.”

Some liberal factions of the Democratic Party have complained in recent months that Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the two most powerful elected Democrats in Washington, have been unwilling to listen to demands from the progressive base. Many were angry last week after Pelosi and Schumer struck a deal with President Trump to increase the federal borrowing limit and extend current spending levels through December.

Progressives such as Reps. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) and Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) said the Democratic base is not interested in working with Trump. Instead, they want action on key agenda items such as securing legal protections for those immigrants who benefited from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which Trump began winding down last week.

“Our base is deeply alienated from this president,” Connolly said in an interview with the Washington Post. “Our base is not saying, ‘Work with him, try to find some common ground.’”

...“Fortunately, I’m a progressive from San Francisco. I’m a liberal, and I have my own credibility on these subjects,” Pelosi said. “While we all share our values and priorities and the rest, I think Chuck [Schumer] and I are both strong Democrats.”

Both Democratic leaders have said they think it is their job to work with Trump where possible to pass legislation that meets the values of the party. Pelosi said it is her job to get bills passed.

“You can never satisfy everybody,” Pelosi said. “We don’t have a responsibility to get nothing done.”

Several political organizations supportive of Sanders have said voters should reject any Democrats who do not support “Medicare for All.” Nina Turner, who now leads Sanders’s Our Revolution group, told Politico this summer that there was “something wrong” with Democrats who did not endorse it. The People for Bernie, a group that grew out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, started the week by urging progressives to call Democrats and demand that they endorse Sanders’s bill.

Yesterday we asked a dozen Democratic House candidates to describe in one sentence what motivates their campaign. 8 of them used the words "single payer," "universal health care" or "Medicare-For-All" in their single sentence-- from Randy Bryce in Wisconsin ("I'm running for Congress to help raise everyone's standard of life; everyone is worthy of being healthy which is why Medicare-for-All is a top priority.") and Derrick Crowe in Texas ("We're fighting for liberty and justice for all-- and in practice that means tuition-free college, Medicare For All, real climate change action, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, and a pro-rural agenda that gets the Democrats back to their populist roots.") to Tim Canova in Florida ("I am campaigning to put basic human needs and human values ahead of unfettered corporate greed and profits and I'm proud to support a people's agenda: election integrity reforms to ensure transparency and accuracy in vote counting, Medicare For All, federal subsidies for K-12 and tuition-free higher education, a voluntary national service program modeled on New Deal public works programs...").

Wouldn't it be ironic if conservative Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) signs onto Medicare-For-All before Pelosi! It probably won't, but it could happen. When asked about Bernie's bill yesterday, Manchin said "It should be explored. I want to know what happens in all the countries that have it-- how well it works or the challenges they have."

The good old days

Alas, Pelosi, unbeknownst to herself, has slipped into the position Dick Gephardt was in when she wrested control of the party from him-- she is now the spokesperson for the Republican wing of the Democratic Party and is at odds and no longer in synch with the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. The House Democrats are endangering their chances to win back a majority next year by keeping her on as their Leader. She is one of the most detested and hated politicians in America and more than a few voters may hesitate-- Trump or no Trump-- to pull the lever for a Democratic candidate on election day for fear of making her Speaker.

And if you're wondering what the scumbag who has been sucking off Wall Street since the early 1980s when he was first elected to Congress-- and has taken more in bribes from the banksters than any other politician in history who hasn't run for president ($26,628,675 since 1990 when the figures began being compiled)-- has to say about Medicare-for-All... "Democrats believe that health care is a right for all, and there are many different bills out there," pointedly refusing to get behind Bernie's bill. How could he, when his two Senate recruits this year are corrupt corporate Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) and Jacky Rosen (NV)-- neither of whom supports anything normal Democrats support (except abortions and gays)? Schumer-- worst and most corrupt Democratic Senate Leader ever!

Bernie: "Do we, as a nation, join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee comprehensive health care to every person as a human right? Or do we maintain a system that is enormously expensive, wasteful and bureaucratic, and is designed to maximize profits for big insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, Wall Street and medical equipment suppliers? We remain the only major country on earth that allows chief executives and stockholders in the health care industry to get incredibly rich, while tens of millions of people suffer because they can’t get the health care they need. This is not what the United States should be about."

No, but it's what Chuck Schumer's career has always been all about. More Bernie: "The reason that our health care system is so outrageously expensive is that it is not designed to provide quality care to all in a cost-effective way, but to provide huge profits to the medical-industrial complex. Layers of bureaucracy associated with the administration of hundreds of individual and complicated insurance plans is stunningly wasteful, costing us hundreds of billions of dollars a year. As the only major country not to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry, we spend tens of billions more than we should... Now is the time for Congress to stand with the American people and take on the special interests that dominate health care in the United States. Now is the time to extend Medicare to everyone."

DCCC Has A Litmus Test For Its Candidates-- They Don't Want Medicare-For-All Backers

When I was a kid my father owned a small clothing store in Bed-Stuy, which was part of the Assembly district Shirley Chisholm represented. I used to work there frequently. Soon after I wen t off to college Chisholm was elected Brooklyn's first-ever African-America congressmember (as well as the first black woman ever elected to Congress in the U.S.)... talk about a pioneer and a game-changer. When she was first elected, the white men who ran Congress decided to demean her by appointing her to the Agriculture Committee. We're they in for a shock when she worked with farm state Republicans to turn the country's surplus food into a robust food stamp program that fed poor people and helped create the WIC program-- Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. There's one quote of hers that always inspired me and that I never forgot: "If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair." She'll always be one of my heroes. One day-- soon I hope-- we'll have a woman president. Shirley was the first woman to run for a major party nomination, something that I hope leads soon to President Warren.

The establishment and their shills-- some consciously so, others just instinctively-- are in an uproar about "litmus tests" and "purity." And, indeed, Pelosi's DCCC seem to have created a litmus test of it's own-- they are favoring Blue Dogs, "ex"-Republicans, wealthy self-funders and anti-Choice candidates over actual Democrats. Rahm made the DCCC a vehicle for this kind of garbage in 2005 but it's now become systematized under Steve Israel and Ben Ray Lujan. As we mentioned earlier, they also seem to be making health care a litmus test-- candidates campaigning for Medicare-For-All, which is backed my the majority of Democrats in Congress-- are being shoved aside in favor of candidates who refuse to say where they stand on the issue. Yesterday a centrist establishment economist who's been an anti-Sanders propagandist for some time now, wrote in the NY Times that "single-payer, while it has many virtues, isn’t the only way to get [to universal health coverage]; it would be much harder politically than its advocates acknowledge; and there are more important priorities." He wrote that "some progressives-- by and large people who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries-- are already trying to revive one of his signature proposals: expanding Medicare to cover everyone. Some even want to make support for single-payer a litmus test for Democratic candidates. So it’s time for a little pushback." I gave up reading this clown over a year ago and normally avoid him like the plague, but his stats from the Commonwealth Fund are interesting. It "compares health care performance among advanced nations. America is at the bottom; the top three performers are Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands. And the thing is, these three leaders have very different systems. Britain has true socialized medicine: The government provides health care directly through the National Health Service. Australia has a single-payer system, basically Medicare for All-- it’s even called Medicare. But the Dutch have what we might call Obamacare done right: individuals are required to buy coverage from regulated private insurers, with subsidies to help them afford the premiums." Of course, he favors the least progressive of the three approaches and claims the Dutch system is the way to go-- "incremental improvements in the A.C.A., rather than radical change. Further evidence for this view is how relatively well Obamacare, imperfect as it is, already works in states that try to make it work-- did you know that only 5.4 percent of New Yorkers are now uninsured?" And he claims "the political logic that led to Obamacare rather than Medicare for all still applies."

It’s not just about paying off the insurance industry, although getting insurers to buy in to health reform wasn’t foolish, and arguably helped save the A.C.A.: At a crucial moment America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry lobbying organization, and Blue Cross Blue Shield intervened to denounce Republican plans.

A far more important consideration is minimizing disruption to the 156 million people who currently get insurance through their employers, and are largely satisfied with their coverage. Moving to single-payer would mean taking away this coverage and imposing new taxes; to make it fly politically you’d have to convince most of these people both that they would save more in premiums than they pay in additional taxes, and that their new coverage would be just as good as the old.

This might in fact be true, but it would be one heck of a hard sell. Is this really where progressives want to spend their political capital?

What would I do instead? I’d enhance the A.C.A., not replace it, although I would strongly support reintroducing some form of public option-- a way for people to buy into public insurance-- that could eventually lead to single-payer.

Meanwhile, progressives should move beyond health care and focus on other holes in the U.S. safety net.

He says he has nothing against single-payer... he just hates progressives and everything they stand for and... Hillary Forever. Matt Bruening at BuzzFeed, who writes that Democrats need to recognize that the Affordable Care Act is too flawed to save and that single payer is the only path forward, had a more sensible perspective-- one more in touch with reality-- than Krugman's stubborn centrism.

In the course of defending Obamacare, centrist pundits and institutions made a moral argument about the brutality of health uninsurance that also renders our current system totally indefensible. The Center for American Progress released a report showing that the Republican bill would cause around 200,000 more people to die over the next decade due to lack of health insurance, while Vox’s Ezra Klein described the CBO’s report detailing the collapse of health insurance coverage as “one of the most singularly devastating documents I’ve seen in American politics.”

If the 200,000 more deaths caused by switching from Obamacare to the defunct Republican plan is an unspeakable moral atrocity, then how do we justify sticking with Obamacare-- which still leaves millions uninsured-- rather than moving to a universal single-payer system? The math that produced CAP’s estimates, based on a study that concluded 1 person dies unnecessarily for every 830 people who lack health insurance, would imply that 300,000 additional deaths will be caused by Obamacare relative to a universal system where everyone is covered.

There is simply no longer a coherent centrist case for carrying on with Obamacare.

The Affordable Care Act did a lot of good, but the system it has left us with is still a disaster. According to Gallup, around 11.3% of adults currently lack health insurance. Despite the existence of Medicaid, uninsurance remains especially prevalent among those living in poverty. A Treasury study based on 2014 tax data concluded that the uninsurance rate for poor families was 10 times higher than it is for high-income families.

The problem is even worse than those numbers suggest. Tallies of people lacking health insurance are done at a particular point in time, meaning that they obscure just how often people move in and out of health insurance. Over half of the non-elderly population receive employer-sponsored insurance and, in a given year, over 40% of workers separate from their jobs. Not every separation results in an uninsurance spell, but many do.

Even if they manage to keep insurance when between jobs, workers and their families face the miserable hassle of draining their savings to preserve coverage through COBRA, signing up for health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges, or having to switch to an entirely different plan at their new job.

Even those who remain consistently insured face yet another coverage problem: high out-of-pocket expenses. According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent economic well-being report, 23% of Americans with health insurance forgo medical treatment every year because of an inability to pay.

A single-payer system is the most obvious way forward to finally achieve what all of our developed country peers did many decades ago: an easy-to-use, cost-effective health insurance system that covers everyone.

In many ways, the Obamacare experience provides the best argument for the universal alternative. Obamacare primarily increased health insurance coverage through two mechanisms: expanding Medicaid eligibility up the income ladder and creating an elaborate, subsidized individual marketplace. The Medicaid expansion, which closely approximates what a single-payer system would look like, was a smashing success. The individual marketplace, however, has been awful, with premiums increasing dramatically and insurance choices dwindling to two, one, or even zero options in some places.

Crucially, the superior performance of Medicaid was noted not just by wonks but also by ordinary people. Report after report after report has documented the existence of Medicaid envy: people bitter that they had been forced onto the individual marketplace because their income is too high for Medicaid. Contrary to the beliefs of Obamacare’s architects, it appears that people would much rather be on public health insurance, even on a stigmatized program for those on low incomes, than deal with private insurers.

The individual preference for public insurance is reflected in public polling as well. According to Gallup, 58% of Americans favor replacing the current system with a “federally funded healthcare program providing insurance for all Americans.” Among Democrats, support soars to 73%.

The Democratic party has generally ignored its voters on this issue, but that is starting to change. Around 60% of House Democrats are now cosponsors of John Conyers’ single-payer bill, the highest number recorded in the 12 years since it was first introduced. Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, both of whom are rumored as likely 2020 presidential candidates, have recently announced their support for a single-payer system as well. The current frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders, has long made single-payer one of his signature issues.

Now that the Republicans have failed, the time is ripe for a serious single-payer push. Policy institutions need to work hard to hammer out the details of a single-payer plan, and the Democratic party needs to stop fumbling around incompetently for a positive vision and instead unify behind the one already supported by the overwhelming majority of its voters.

I asked one of our most fearless congressional candidates, David Gill, if he would be interested in commenting on this post. He got back to me and said "Do I want to add a quote on this post? You bet I do!! This is IL-13 in a nutshell!"

I have been a dues-paying member of Physicians for a National Health Program for 25 years, a group of 20,000 doctors who have been advocating for Single-Payer healthcare for all these years. As a family physician and as an Emergency Department physician, I'm well aware of the many shortcomings of healthcare and healthcare financing, both pre- and post-ACA.

I ran for Congress in 2012 and defeated the centrist establishment-backed Democrat in the primary that year. I lost in the general by 0.3%, thanks to the presence of a liberal independent on the ballot that year who split the vote just barely enough to keep me out of Washington. Subsequent Democrats (moderates) have lost here by 50 to 60 times what I lost by, further evidence of the strength of my message. I'm running again, because the time is ripe to finally bring single-payer to fruition, and I look forward to helping lead the charge, speaking with a voice of authority, based on my nearly 30 years of patient care. But is the DCCC behind me? No, of course not. Instead, they've recruited a former fundraiser of Senator Dick Durbin, a woman who speaks in broad generalities about health care, offering such platitudes as "I want to fix what needs to be fixed with Obamacare, not throw it out."

With the help of Blue America, I'm looking forward to beating the DCCC again in our primary next March, and then finishing the job in November 2018. We've waited way too long for the system which will be great for our health and for our economy: single-payer. We are nearing the end of the era dominated by the for-profit health insurance industry.

David defines "courageous" among candidates we've worked with. Please consider helping him win his battle to end conservative domination of his sprawling central Illinois district that goes from Bloomington and Champaign in the north, through Decatur and Springfield to the outer suburbs east of St. Louis, by tapping on the thermometer on the right.

We're Fine With A Good Litmus Test... But Not With Identity Politics

Blue America is now backing 3 exceptional military vets for Congress-- Doug Applegate (D-CA), Randy Bryce (D-WI) and Jim Thompson (D-KS). I have to admit, though, that we didn't decide to endorse any of them because of their service. We endorsed each one because of their progressive policy positions and because they convinced us that they are sincere about those positions. All 3 back John Conyers' Medicare-For-All legislation, for example, but all three really mean it. It's not like the California legislative phonies who campaigned on single payer taking special interest money and who then refused to enact single payer when they had a chance. And it's not like the corrupt conservatives-- Joe Crowley comes right to mind-- who are owned, lock-stock-and-barrel, by the special interests, but who opportunistically pretend to back single payer to avoid the political consequences of not backing it. Eventually even Debbie Wasserman Schultz will say she's for single payer! But Applegate, Bryce and Thompson really are.

Someone seeing we are backing the 3 prominent and outspoken vets called me today and told me about another vet and made the case about what a good soldier he had been. I listened politely and asked him to have the veteran call me so we could talk about what matters most to Blue America members-- where he stands on issues. It's the same with an "identity" group. A woman politician I totally admire was going on yesterday about how we have to elect more women to Congress. I agree that it would be nice-- and more equitable-- if at least 50% of the members of Congress are women. But not at the expense of electing bad members. As I've said before, the best voting record in Congress happens to belong to a woman, Pramila Jayapal of Seattle. But the worst voting record among congressional Democrats also belongs to a woman, Kyrsten Sinema, a grotesquely corrupt Blue Dog from the Phoenix area. Among the top dozen most progressive voters in Congress, 4 are women: Pramila, Katherine Clark (MA), Judy Chu (CA) and Jan Schakowsky (IL) but look at the dozen worst-- aide from Sinema you find unbelievably terrible conservaDems: Stephanie Murphy (FL), Jacky Rosen (NV) and Cheri Bustos (IL).

There is no "identity group" you can name where I couldn't point to excellent members and atrocious members. IT's not a good way to look at candidates. That said, I agree with Katha Pollitt's assertion in the new Nation that pro-choice women are a crucial base of the Democratic Party and that running anti-Choice candidates is a disastrous idea that will not just be a loser but will further impair the party's already-tattered brand. "Imagine," she wrote, if Democrats, sick and tired of losing white votes in Mississippi, decided to nominate a segregationist for governor. Imagine if they found that LGBTQ rights turn off voters in Tennessee, so they ran one of those anti-same-sex-marriage Christian bakers. Imagine if they found that plenty of Oklahoma voters didn’t believe in climate change, so they ran a denialist. After all, why get hung up on one item in the long list of good things we all support when the important thing is getting back into power? Everyone has to take one for the team sometimes, right?" And then she explained why "not right," but wong, wrong, wrong.

Only women are expected to let history roll backwards over them. Only women’s rights to contraception and abortion are perpetually debatable, postponable, side-trackable, while those who insist on upholding the party platform-- and the Constitution-- are dismissed as rigid ideologues with a “litmus test.” Party leaders can’t come right out and say so-- in fact, Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez has issued a statement declaring that abortion rights are non-negotiable. But if you pay attention, you can feel the waters are being tested. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi told the Washington Post,“This is not a rubber-stamp party.” Why else would Perez meet with Democrats for Life? And why did so many pay such close attention to Heath Mello, a former state legislator in Nebraska with a long record of anti-abortion votes, who ran for mayor of Omaha with the approval of both Bernie Sanders, and, initially, Perez? Maybe they hadn’t done their due diligence and didn’t know, or maybe it was a test: Can we win in red states if we run anti-abortion candidates?

After Mello lost, some blamed meddling out-of-state pro-choicers and the national media for making his many anti-abortion votes in the State Legislature a high-profile issue, despite the fact that his opponent was a reasonably popular Republican incumbent. So then why did the takeaway become “Ooh, look at those mean pro-choicers messing with our candidate” and not “Well, I guess being anti-choice isn’t such a vote-getter after all, and the price in nationwide opposition is too high to pay”? See above: because the issue concerns women’s rights. Amazingly, it is still an open question whether a woman is a person or a human bassinet.

Now comes Joshua Svaty, who is running in Kansas’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. Svaty, who served most recently as the state secretary of agriculture and EPA adviser, has a long anti-choice record from his years in the State Legislature (2003–9). He voted for no less than 11 anti-abortion bills, including one that declares the “unborn child” a person from the moment of conception, and a rather confusingly worded measure, vetoed by then-Governor Kathleen Sebelius, that would have allowed a woman’s husband, parent, or guardian to sue the clinic to prevent her from getting an abortion or receive damages if one had been performed. Never mind what the woman wanted; her pregnancy belongs to her family.

Kansas presents an opportunity for the Democrats. Governor Sam Brownback, who can’t run again due to term limits, has ruined the state’s finances, cutting education and other services to hand out tax cuts, and right now it looks as if the Republican candidate will be Kris Kobach, Kansas’s secretary of state, most famous for his ongoing efforts to take away voting rights from as many people as possible. The conventional wisdom is that you need to be anti-choice to win in Kansas, where the “pro-life” movement has long been extremely militant. But is that true? According to a 2016 poll, 30 percent of Kansans want to ban abortion completely, which is much higher than the national average; 30 percent want it to be legal; and 38 percent said they wouldn’t choose abortion for themselves but that the government shouldn’t prevent women from making their own decision. Over half said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who wanted to defund Planned Parenthood, which Brownback tried to do before being blocked by the courts; 32 percent said they would be more likely to vote for such a candidate. Indeed, in 2016, even as Trump carried the state by 56.2 percent, Kansas Democrats elected 17 new members to the State Legislature, most of them pro-choice.

Remember, too, that Sebelius was a popular pro-choice governor until 2009, not so long ago. Her predecessor, Bill Graves, a Republican, was pro-choice as well. True, back in the 1990s, Democratic Governor Joan Finney was anti-choice, but Finney pretty much left abortion alone. Svaty is different. Like Mello, he was a hard-core extremist during his time as a legislator. “When I began my career, I was representing a very conservative, Catholic rural district,” he told me when we spoke by phone. “Governing the state is a big shift.” When I asked why he couldn’t have told his constituents that he wasn’t going to support bills that were flatly unconstitutional because that was a waste of money and time, he said, “I’ve gained a better understanding over time of what appropriate legislation is. I hope I’ve changed and improved substantially over time.” That’s not enough for Laura McQuade, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains: “He needs to do a little bit more than move away from his record. He needs to embrace reproductive rights. Will he be a voice for change? That’s not what we’re hearing.”

What tends to get forgotten by those who push for the Democratic Party to run anti-abortion candidates is that the party base is pro-choice. That is who votes in primaries, and that is who knocks on doors and makes phone calls and gets out the vote on Election Day. An anti-abortion Dem might steal some votes from the Republican candidate, but at the cost of losing the most ardent Democrats-- who happen to be women. “If you’re a Dem or unaffiliated pro-choice voter, you’re going to sit on your hands on Election Day,” says Julie Burkhart, who runs the Trust Women South Wind Women’s Center in Wichita and a pro-choice PAC, Trust Women. “People are Democrats for a reason.” There’s a pro-choicer running in the primary, Carl Brewer, former mayor of Wichita. Sounds like he knows that.

I might add that so far this year Blue America has endorsed only one Kansas candidate, the aforementioned progressive veteran, Jim Thompson-- please contribute to his campaign here-- and he's a fully committed and enthusiastic pro-choice progressive. Thompson's statement on Choice is clear and unambiguous and it's the answer all Democratic candidates should get behind. This is what he told us this morning: "I believe in bodily autonomy and I trust women to make decisions, within the law, about their own bodies." People who don't trust women to make decisions about their own body shouldn't be running for office as Democrats.