Tag: The Democrat

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.

[Bloomberg] clearly was not prepared for these rather obvious questions, perhaps because he is a cloistered plutocrat surrounded by yes men and toadies, or perhaps because there is no defense at all. He appeared very much like what he in fact is — a very rich man who is likely facing bitter, unfiltered criticism to his face for the first time in years.

Ryan Cooper writing for The Week.

While I’m sure we’ll get plenty of “why are they so mean to Bloomberg” takes today, I’d say his ~$500M attempt to buy his way into both the Democratic party and the White House are effectively over.

Welcome to the Bullshit Economy

This whole thing needs to be the one and only speech any and all Democratic candidates for President give over the next, oh, five months; but I’d even settle for just a paragraph:

The Iowa disaster is a sign that our economic structures are breaking down, that private enterprise has become a shell game, where who you know matters more than what you can do. The bullshit economy has bled over into politics, with the perfect president but also the perfect amount of grifting and consultant corruption and unbridled tech optimism. This has long been part of politics—anything with that much money sloshing around will invite a little corruption—but the combination of political grift, the ardor for public-private partnerships, and the triumph of ambition over talent has created a fetid stew.

Welcome to the Bullshit Economy

[Assuming] a wildly optimistic scenario in which Dems do about as well as they can be reasonably hope to do in the 2020 Senate elections and a majority decides to eliminate the filibuster, passing any legislation will require at least two Democratic senators who are refusing to even commit to endorsing the Democratic nominee in 2020. Medicare For All is not going to be passed in the next Congress. Joe Biden’s robust public option, for that matter, is not going to be passed by the next Congress. This is true no matter who becomes president. This is about establishing long-term goals and mobilizing voters — that’s it. So Warren’s plan is fine, Bernie’s plan is fine, and to act as if difference in minor details in them will have policy consequences for the next administration or should influence anybody’s primary vote either way is nuts.

Scott Lemieux, writing for Lawers, Guns, and Money. This seems so self evident as to be utterly banal were we living in any reasonable simulacrum of a shared reality, yet here we are. It’s almost as if those fanning the flames of this “disagreement” have motives that aren’t entirely pure.

Why Nancy Pelosi Won’t Impeach

Required reading from Elizabeth Spiers. Two particularly salient excerpts:

By implying that impeachment in the Senate is the point, Pelosi denies the importance of the process itself—without which impeachment in the Senate wouldn’t happen in any case. And others have argued better and more persuasively than I could that Senate impeachment isn’t the primary or best reason to do it. Referral to the Senate may be in fact be unnecessary and undesirable.

[…]

A slim minority—just 19 percent—of polled opinion supported Richard Nixon’s impeachment at the outset of the Watergate scandal, and by the end of the House Judiciary Committee’s televised impeachment hearings, a strong majority supported it. And that shift in opinion translated into a massive wave of Democratic gains in the 1974 midterm balloting.

Why Nancy Pelosi Won’t Impeach