Tag: 2022

An Early Retirement

This is a sentence that succinctly captures one of the fundamental and pervasive problems with modern Democratic politics:

“Nadler, 75, is all but guaranteed at least one more term in Washington in the solidly Democratic district while Maloney, 76, will be forced into an early retirement.”

Ross Barkan writing for New York Magazine

Maybe one day, in the far far future, Dear Leader Trump XXVI will allow a Democrat under 70 to run for and hold office in one of the indentured provinces. A person can dream.

It’s the Leaks

Perhaps we can get ahead of the “forget the impact of overturning Roe, it’s the leaking of the draft decision that matters” nonsense like this:

The release of the 98-page document is unprecedented in the court’s modern history: Early drafts of opinions have virtually never leaked before the final decision is announced, and never in such a consequential case. And early drafts of opinions often change by the time the decision from the court is announced.

Michael D. Shear and Adam Liptak writing in the Times of New York

if we actually bother to point out that this characterization is categorically false. Thirty seconds of Googling would net you this highly relevant bit of information that the Post somehow managed to find and print:

…it is not true that rulings have never been given to journalists before the announcement of the decision by the court. In fact, the result in Roe v. Wade itself was leaked by a Supreme Court clerk to a Time magazine reporter in January 1973. The issue of Time, with an article titled “The Sexes: Abortion on Demand,” appeared on newsstands hours before the decision was announced by Justice Harry Blackmun.

James B. Robenalt, Washington Post

We knew this decision was coming and we know that birth control is next. Codifying into law national bans on both would be planks in the GOP platform if they bothered with such documents anymore. This almost makes one think there’s a reason they don’t put out platforms anymore.

As it stands, the GOP is out there every day messaging against Griswold as being of a piece with Roe in the “wrongly decided” department of GOP jurisprudence i.e. “privacy for me but not for thee.” With a functioning Democrat party you might be able to message against that because, last time I checked, access to birth control both in and out of marriage is a pretty popular thing. Access to “safe, legal, and rare” style of regulated abortion is also a 70/30 “for” proposition. But our Establishment Democrat is still not sure they should do anything about being characterized daily as part of an organized pedophilia cult that likely drinks baby blood. This is why they fail.

The Current Crisis, Writ Small

The absolute absence of any urgency among establishment Democrats is evident all over the map today. Both are regional dust-ups that paint a much wider story, the first in Idaho where a Political Science professor by the name of Scott Yenor made some extremely dumb-assed comments:

Our culture is steeped with feminism. It teaches young boys and girls that they are motivated by much the same things and want much the same things. Thus, girls are told to become as independent as boys are said to be. […] They are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be. […] Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children. […] Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.

So, a dumb-ass. Fine. Becca Savransky, author of the linked article, reached out to State Senator Melissa Wintrow, a Boise Democrat and the former director of the Boise State Women’s Center. She apparently called the remarks “dehumanizing,” which is a good start. Then she proceed to say:

We’re not going back to the 1950s, I don’t know what everybody is so afraid of. Let’s drop our weapons. Let people be who they want to be.

Unfortunately, she’s wrong about two things here and missed an opportunity. People like Scott Yenor, the current GOP leadership, and all the many Trump voting GOPers out there aren’t after a return to the 1950s. They want a return to the 1850s. Back when Black people and women knew their place and, when they didn’t, could be and were shown their place. That’s who everybody should be afraid of and it’s not an academic issue to mull over a good whiskey anymore. It’s facing us at the national political level right now and every day until the 2022 midterms. Problem is, most folks don’t even hear much about that because it’s not stated when the microphones are turned on for some “Democratic response” to absolute bile like Yenor all the way up the chain to the extremely similar bile coming from people in actual power or who, you know, were either planning or directly involved in attempting and/or abetting violent insurrection against these United States in January of this year.

Second example, this one from Georgia, where there may be some troubling lack of Democratic voter engagement. Yes, just a drawn out race for mayor of Atlanta, but buried in the story is this bombshell:

Next year, the [Democratic Party] machine is going to be up and running at the fullest extent of its power, and you are going to see all this money flowing into Georgia

Antonio Brown, Atlanta City Council member

Always “next year” with establishment Democrats. Instead of screaming about election access and voting rights, you can always hear them saying “We only need to show up and work when it’s the big election cycles for the top offices,” regardless of vast recent evidence to the contrary. Compare and contrast that attitude with the GOP, currently and aggressively taking control of county election boards in red states across the country (you’ll recall those as the election boards that refused to throw the election to Trump regardless of vote count in 2020), rewriting election laws in every state they can (to make it easier to disregard vote counts when the GOP candidate loses), limiting access to voting in every state they can (including Georgia, where we see in this article that turnout is down, at least in part due to restrictions placed on vote-by-mail and early voting), and blocking any attempts to reform any part of creating guarantees for voting access, controls for the drawing of equitable voting districts, and broad standards for state and local election certification at the federal level.

But it is, of course, perfectly fine for the Democrats to take a long rest and really only bother to wind that old machine up for the really big races. No trouble with that approach at all.

This is why they fail.