Tag: house

Ed Kilgore has some thoughts on Democratic leadership and the need for term-limits (and specifically for Nancy Pelosi):

Ever since Democrats fell short of their 2016 goal of taking back control of the U.S. House, there’s been talk about […] leadership change in the House Democratic Caucus. And after Democrats failed to win any of the four GOP House seats where special elections were held this year, there was renewed talk about Nancy Pelosi stepping down as House Democratic Leader. The negative buzz became particularly loud after the party’s biggest special-election hope, Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, suffered a disappointing loss, in the wake of Republicans running many millions of dollars of ads linking the candidate to Pelosi.

[…]

[Pelosi] is a much bigger target for Republicans than Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell appears to be for Democrats. Part of the problem may simply be that she happens to represent a jurisdiction with rich negative symbolism (dating back at least to the attacks on “San Francisco Democrats” in 1984 after the Donkey Party held its convention in the City by the Bay) for the conservatives who are mostly the target for anti-Pelosi ads. You cannot quite imagine Democrats running ads mocking Paul Ryan’s Wisconsin or Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky in this manner.

Emphasis added by me because Kilgore completely discounts the most important information in his several paragraphs. The demonization of Pelosi has nothing to do with her having been in the arena for too long, being a woman, coming from San Francisco, or anything else. Those are all useful pegs for the GOP to build their messaging on and around, but they aren’t themselves decisive or even all that interesting. Anyone serving as minority leader will immediately come under sustained and focused attack from the right wing and their stenographers in much of the media. It’s Cokie’s Law: if information, factual or otherwise, is “out there” then it must be discussed uncritically. Thus the media happily carries the GOP messaging machine’s water on Pelosi and anybody else in the cross-hairs that day. There’s just no getting around it, and The Democrat not only doesn’t have anything like this, they aren’t even on the same planet with the scale and coordination of this operation. Unless and until they create a sustained messaging attack on McConnell and Ryan, those two can continue right on doing what they’re doing. Just to focus on McConnell, he’s likely the most destructive force in government today, but most people would be hard pressed to name him, much less know what he’s been up to and why it is dismantling the way our government has, until recently, functioned.
That’s simply not the case for Pelosi, and that has nothing to do with the fact that she’s from San Francisco and everything to do with a sustained, targeted, and years long messaging attack that salts the Earth and leaves useful framing tools for any GOP hopeful to pick up and use, readymade. Democrats try to build the machine from scratch with every individual election, every cycle. How’s that working out for them?

Lastly, if you like the ACA, thank Nancy Pelosi. Period. That doesn’t mean she gets a pass to serve in party leadership forever, but she did that lift more or less with her own political momentum and within the context of the sustained, entirely negative noise machine and well after perceptions about her in the media were set in stone. Think on that as you try to show her the door.

Remember how Howard Dean put together a 50-state strategy and everybody laughed at him, and then when the wave election hit in 2006, all the credit went to Rahm Emanuel because so many of our elite pundits admire unapologetic dickheads most of all?
Anyway, I was thinking of that last night when I realized that Eric Cantor had lost his primary to a religio-Randian economics prof and the Democratic alternative was a place-holder named Jack Trammell, who […] this morning finds himself in a more winnable race than existed at six o’clock last night. Why, I thought, hasn’t Trammell, or someone like him – or a couple of someones like him – been out there for six months beating more hell out of Cantor than Dave Brat was? Why did his website look like it was designed by Jukt Micronics?
The Republicans never shied away from going after Tom Daschle, or Tom Foley before him. Why were national Democrats caught flat-footed by last night’s results? It’s their job not to be surprised by this kind of thing. The primary benefit of Dean’s approach was that it presumed that progressive ideas could sell anywhere, and that it was part of the mandate of a national party not to concede any race anywhere.

Charlie Pierce is exactly right. You run in 50 states. All the time. Every race. Worst case scenario, somebody is out there talking about your issues, day in and day out. Best case scenario, an unexpectedly competitive race falls in your lap. Nothing summarizes the consummate failure of The Democrat to affect policy even (or especially) when they hold the White House more than the simple inability to tell the general public clearly and succinctly what they stand for as a party, how that differs from what the GOP is offering, and then to clearly and consistently run on that in all races.
Instead, they stay in the defensive crouch, hand the GOP legislative victory after legislative victory, and then when the GOP still demands more, they say “well, okay, but can we at least slow the systematic dismantlement of government down just a bit?” and call it a ringing bipartisan victory.

This has to stop. In fact, it had to stop a couple of decades ago but still hasn’t been addressed save for that one Dean-lead cycle Pierce mentions. It’s a simple fact that you have to be running candidates in every race and are out there every day talking about a few key facets of Your Plan for America. Preferably the ones that are polling about 80% in your favor and that your local Tea Klan candidate is required to be most vociferously against. Like allowing women to drive. That sort of thing. It certainly helps that the major issues of the day are polling in your favor, sometimes dramatically so, but a political operation still needs to let people know about that.

[…] 4. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that in FY 2014 (which runs from October 2013 through September 2014), total federal income will be $3,042 billion and total spending will be $3,602 billion, a difference of $560 billion.

5. This is the amount of debt we need to issue to pay for everything in the budget, which means that if the debt limit isn’t raised, we need to immediately cut spending by $560 billion, or $46 billion per month.

6. That’s roughly the equivalent of wiping out the entire Defense Department; or wiping out two-thirds of Social Security; or wiping out all of Medicaid + all unemployment insurance + all food assistance + all veterans’ benefits.

Kevin Drum, excerpted from a longer “10 sentences about” piece on the debt ceiling breach.

He’s right, of course, but I think he also touches on exactly the sort of messaging that’s required here by the Democrats. Out there, every day, saying “why does the GOP want to eliminate the Defense Department?” until people just can’t stand to hear it anymore. Then you say it 10,000,000 more times. Then, when the lunatic wing of the GOP relents or is bypassed by some less pure version of democracy in the House than “the majority of the majority party rule,” you continue to say “why did they want to eliminate the Defense Department? Can we trust a party that would take away all veterans benefits over some sort of party ideological purity test?” You continue saying something like that for at least 20 years, after which it might start to sink in.

This doesn’t seem so hard to understand, but The Democrat still doesn’t seem to get it.

…maybe part of the problem is we need to go back into the schools at a very early age, maybe at the grade school level, and have a class for the young girls and have a class for the young boys and say, ‘You know, this is what’s important. This is what a father does that is maybe a little different, maybe a little bit better than the talents that a mom has in a certain area. And the same thing for the young girls, that, you know, this is what a mom does, and this is what is important from the standpoint of that union which we call marriage.’

Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.), on the floor of the House of Representatives yesterday. These are the views of the people that are holding the country hostage. And the hostages can’t seem to find a way of effectively countering any of it.
Source: maddowblog.msnbc.com

[The Hastert] rule is completely dead. The Democrats now effectively control the floor because nothing ‘big’ will come to the floor without knowing in advance that lots of Democrats support it. That gives the Democrats tremendous power in a body where the minority is not designed to have much power.

Unnamed Republican Aide, likening the appropriate and intended function of the House to “tremendous power.” How we can have an MSM that drones on and on about “reaching across the aisle” in the face of a reality that includes a de facto rule stating that nothing moves unless it will pass with only majority votes is and long has been beyond me.

Even still, former Speaker Hastert’s own reaction to the weakening and even ending of his “rule” is all the more telling:

Maybe you can do it once, maybe you can do it twice, but when you start making deals when you have to get Democrats to pass the legislation, you are not in power anymore.

So, then, making a deal at all is tantamount to surrendering all power. Breathtaking.

Source: rollcall.com

Here’s an idea: Democrats demand $100 billion in new tax revenue for every Democratic vote Boehner needs to pass this thing or we kill the hostage (e.g. ‘Merica).

Oh, and did we seem to have concluded an agreement just then? Sorry. We also want a Progressive Taxation amendment to the Constitution.

Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York will step down from office amid intense pressure from congressional Democrats following his admission of risque online chats and photo swaps with multiple women and lying about it.

ABC News reports, you decide. What’s remarkable here is the “intense pressure from congressional Democrats” bit. A member of the GOP caucus could strangle somebody to death on the floor of the House and you’d have little more than an annoyed shrug on the part of either leadership. But let a Democrat sext somebody not-his-wife: hell to pay (though, presumably the same faux pearl clutching outrage would have been mustered if he were still single).
Meanwhile, Tom Coburn orchestrated illegal payoffs to Ensign’s cuckolded friend and, well, I’m sure he was working in the best interests of his Personal Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Let’s just leave it there. Keep walking. Some things in life are meant to be mysterious.

Ryan’s Motivations (or: Pie-O-My)

Kevin Drum wonders what drives Ryan to produce such a uniquely partisan budget document:

I don’t know what motivates Ryan, but it’s certainly not a genuine search for plausible grounds for negotiation. Instead, he’s produced a document carefully crafted to produce a universally negative reaction from Democrats, presumably because he thinks that will make Democrats look intransigent while the Beltway press is praising Ryan for his courage.

Sorry, but that’s just wrong. Ryan crafted his document to produce a Beltway press that praises him for his courage and demand that The Democrat must now compromise based on that starting point. This is why the Democratic party needs to come out with its own pie-in-the-sky progressive budget. Then you could compromise in a way that would represent a legitimate compromise of opposing ideas and not just yet another rightward lurch at the hands of the ever-triangulating Democrats.

Instead, what seems likely to happen is the Democrats will counter with the deficit commission document and then compromise to the right of that. Which is precisely the outcome Ryan likely considers “worst but acceptable.” The sad reality, of course, will be that in the absence of a GOP President, a GOP Senate, and with only a fractionally lunatic GOP House they will have delivered the biggest far-right reshaping of American budgetary priorities (and politics) ever achieved in anyone living’s lifetime. And the Democrats will have only themselves to blame.

…you just need to be really brazen about your flip-flops. Sure, sites like ThinkProgress or Politifact with catch you, and the first few times that happens maybe you’re a little worried about what’s going to happen. But then it dawns on you: nothing is going to happen. Your base doesn’t read ThinkProgress. The media doesn’t really care and is happy to accept whatever obvious nonsense you offer up in explanation. The morning chat shows will continue to book you. It just doesn’t matter.

Kevin Drum, yesterday, on Newt’s ridiculous flip-floppery re: Libya (last week: bomb ‘em into the stone age!; this week: we can’t just go around bombing countries willy nilly!). I thought Drum was being a bit overwrought with this, but then the sad spectacle this morning of NPR doing exactly this…they presented a smorgasbord of GOP talking points about the GOP House not being “consulted” sufficiently pre-bombing.
Of course, these same GOP House members were screaming “bomb! bomb! bomb!” every day of every week leading up to bombs falling, but their opinions were apparently unheeded. As soon as the first bomb fell, though, those opinions did a 180. Now intervention was out of the question. The whole “Obama dithers too much!!!” meme: down the memory hole forever.
NPR uncritically reported this new GOP position, paying zero heed to the old GOP position (of last fucking week), larding it with a “he fools around too much running about in Latin America” and only then stamping the whole moldering package with a fig leaf in the form of a “some say” from an administration flack.
But yes, NPR is clearly a liberal hellspawn that must be destroyed if we’re ever to have any semblance of balance in reportage.

Strikers and their families: Go Die in the Streets

one section buried deep within [H.R. 1135] adds a startling new requirement. The bill, if passed, would actually cut off all food stamp benefits to any family where one adult member is engaging in a strike against an employer

No need to talk about this kind of stuff at the national level. Shrill. Just let all those troublemakers and their families starve to death already. Christ, it’s their fault we’re in this mess to begin with. GOP to striking workers and their families: Go die in the streets.

Strikers and their families: Go Die in the Streets