Democrats - search results
Brexit Secretary’s ex-aide calls for new ‘Democrats’ party to reverse the EU exit ‘catastrophe'
Democrats Push for More Wells Fargo Hearings After Latest News of Fake Accounts
Video: “Billion-Dollar Mistake”: Democrats Neglect People of Color While Failing to Woo White Trump...
Ron Paul on Real Bipartisanship: Republicans and Democrats Unite for New Cold War
“A Better Deal”? Dissecting the Democrats’ “Populist” Turn in Rhetoric and Reality
Democrats offer new explanation for why Trump won – and it’s not Russia
Democrats & Russians 'laughing' at 'witch hunt' collusion probe – Trump
Investigators, Democrats & Trump staff turn to Facebook for Russia probe answers
Trump White House Ridiculously Blames Democrats for Republicans' Repeal Failure
Medicare for All Wins Backing of Conservative Southern Democrats
‘Dreamers’ may lose DACA deportation relief, Homeland chief warns Democrats
Democrats seek to block Trump-Putin cybersecurity plan by cutting US funds
The Democrats’ Russia-gate Obsession
Trump v CNN: Republicans & Democrats at odds when it comes to trustworthiness –...
Video: Assange feels threatened by both Republicans & Democrats following Clinton email leaks–Annie Machon
Video: CrossTalk: Democrats Keep Losing
Trump Is Vulnerable On Education. Do Democrats Care?
Why the Democrats Won't Wake Up
California Scheming: Democrats Betray Single-Payer Again
Democrats Face Failing Russia-gate Scheme
Video: GOP Policies Hurt Trump Voters, But Will Democrats Fill the Void?
Video: As Jon Ossoff Loses Georgia Special Election, Where Do Democrats Go from Here...
Russia-gate Flops as Democrats’ Golden Ticket
Wishful Thinking in Defense of Democrats’ Pro-Business Politics
#HoldTheFloor: Democrats grind Senate to halt in Obamacare repeal bill protest
MoveOn Criticizes Senate Democrats, Republicans for Passage of New Iran Sanctions Bill
Video: Democrats Launch “Resistance Summer” Focused on Healthcare, Education & Social Security
Nearly 200 Democrats sue Trump for accepting foreign payments through businesses
Video: Baltimore Mayor’s Veto of $15/Hr Bill Shows Corporate Wing of Democrats Alive and...
Democrats squabble behind closed doors over Trump impeachment plan
Single-Payer is Not a Priority Even for Democrats Who Say They Support Single-Payer
B-I-N-Oh-No: Michigan Democrats hit with major fine for fundraising bingo games
Democrats Chase Red Herring of Russia-gate
Voters are Fired Up for Single Payer Creating Dilemma for Democrats
Progressive vs political outsider: Democrats face off in CA special election for House seat
Democrats accuse Trump of ‘erasing history’ as GOP recalls copies of torture report
‘We’ll legalize cannabis,’ pledge Liberal Democrats
‘We’ll take 50,000 more Syrian refugees,’ Liberal Democrats pledge
Lavrov trolls NBC before Trump meeting as US media, Democrats lose it over Russia
Democrats said worst things about Comey, now they play so sad – Trump
Video: Democrats Fail to Dig into Trump’s Shady Financial Ties During Hearing
‘The fight isn’t over’: Democrats vow to challenge ‘cruel’ Republican health care reform
Video: Democrats Must Take on Corporate Power If they Want to Win
Democrats seek to re-establish congressional war powers against ISIS
Russia-Bashing Helps Wall Street Democrats
Deal with the devil? Tony Blair could work with Liberal Democrats to hinder Brexit
Democrats hope for upset in Georgia special election
Trump Repairs His Ratings: Syria and the Democrats’ Denunciations of Dissent
Video: A New McCarthyism: Julian Assange Accuses Democrats of Blaming Russia & WikiLeaks for...
Dismal in Des Moines: Democrats are Part of What’s the Matter With Iowa
Democrats’ Blind Obsession on Russia-gate
'Whoa, Whoa, Whoa': Sanders Says Democrats' Intransigence Is Solution, Not Problem
Video: Can the Democrats Build a Progressive Movement Against Trump?
Democrats Trade Places on War and McCarthyism
Video: Sen. Schumer Calls on Democrats to Boycott Neil Gorsuch Vote While Trump is...
Sen. Schumer Calls on Democrats to Boycott Neil Gorsuch Vote While Trump Is Under...
DHS chief ‘dismissive’ of immigration questions frustrates Democrats
Video: Do Corporate Democrats Like Charles Schumer Belong in a Progressive Movement Against Trump?
WTF Do The Democrats Stand For?
Democrats’ McCarthyism Hits Greens’ Stein
The Democrats’ Dangerous Diversion
’Disaster’ poll shows Democrats less popular than Trump, GOP or media
Democrats move to challenge Trump's new travel ban in court
Democrats and Trump Bid Up Militarism
Democrats’ ‘Russian Hacking’ Conspiracy Theory Backfires
Fake News: Media, Democrats Distort Remarks to Target Jeff Sessions
Democrats who sat through Trump tribute to fallen Navy SEAL blasted online (VIDEO)
The Post-Millennial Generation Should Worry Democrats
Three Cheers for the Perez-Ellison DNC Team to Move the Democrats in a Progressive...
'Incredibly Disappointing': Democrats Choose Tom Perez to Head Party
Fair Game: The Resistance Puts Pressure on Complicit Democrats
Democrats call for changes to Electoral College after Trump victory
Democrats, Liberals Catch McCarthyistic Fever
Video: Greenwald: Democrats Seem to Consider Snowden’s & Manning’s Leaks Evil & Leaks Under...
Michael Flynn was 'set up' by Democrats, neocons: Analyst
‘Flynn’s resignation victory for mainstream media & Democrats’ – ex-Pentagon official to RT
#HoldTheFloor: Democrats stage desperate 24hr filibuster against Trump Ed Sec pick DeVos
Elizabeth Warren To Democrats: Only an 'Opposition Party' Can Defeat Trump
The Face of the Enemy: Dupes, Deplorables, Opportunists and Democrats
Why Aren't the Democrats Doing More to Support the Burgeoning Trump Resistance Movement?
Nine Unanimous 'Nays' from Democrats as GOP-Run Committee Approves Jeff Sessions
‘Ammunition to jihadists’: Democrats decry Trump's 'Muslim ban' outside Supreme Court
Game Over for Democrats?
Democrats-linked ethics group sues Trump over ‘unconstitutional’ DC hotel
Thirteen Democrats Join GOP to Kill Sanders Resolution on Canadian Drug Imports
The Democrats’ Russia-Did-It Dodge
Video: Glenn Greenwald: Democrats Eager to Blame “Everybody But Themselves” for Collapse of Their...
Democrats Renew Demand for Slavery Reparations
Trump joins Democrats in blasting House GOP gutting of ethics office
Video: Democrats losing on all fronts, looking for scapegoats – Putin on US elections
Vladimir Putin Trashes Democrats During Press Conference: ‘Learn How To Lose Gracefully'
Video: Democrats make final push against Trump at Electoral College vote
NYT’s False Choice for Democrats: Move to the Right or Divide by Race
Democrats outraged as Trump may keep ‘Apprentice’ credit
The Democrats Do Their Job, Again
Democrats Launch New McCarthyism
Playing Defense: How Progressives Could Push Democrats to Block the Trump Agenda
Majority of Democrats believe Israel is 'burden' on US – poll
Buying Silence: Why So Many Democrats are Mute About Standing Rock
Sore loser Democrats want to abolish Electoral College: Poll
Video: ‘Wall Street Plus Identity Politics’ Formula is Over for the Democrats
Democrats Caused President Trump; They Caused His Victory
Why the Democrats Couldn’t Defeat Someone as Loathsome as Trump
Dumbass Democrats
Video: Greenwald on “Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson...
‘Democrats failed us miserably’: Michael Moore lets rip with post-election ‘To Do List’
Could Bernie have won? Democrats ponder Clinton rout
Video: Democrats Sue Trump & GOP Under 1871 KKK Act for Threatening Voters of...
Democrats accuse FBI of hiding ‘explosive truth’ about Trump-Russia ties
61% of Americans don’t feel represented by either Democrats or Republicans
Trump blasts US ‘voter suppression’ by ‘oversampling Democrats’ in polls
The Democrats’ Joe McCarthy Moment
Lessons From the 2006 Midterms: Will Democrats Disappoint Again?
Insatiable: the Democrats Must Attack Democracy to Serve Corporate Power
Video: Who said it, Trump or Clinton? Democrats Can’t Decide
Voter ID Laws: Why Black Democrats' Fight for the Ballot in Mississippi Still Matters
Video: How Disenchanted Democrats and Republicans Together Can Break the Two Party Duopoly
Video: Democrats urge Hillary to ‘cut off Clinton Foundation’
Fixing Obamacare: The Democrats Have to Talk About It
Video: Open Up the Debates: Green Party’s Jill Stein Accuses Democrats & GOP of...
Obama tells Democrats not to get overconfident about Clinton victory
Hacker strikes again, posts congressional Democrats’ passwords
Video: Julian Assange: Leaked DNC Emails Shows Democrats Waged “Propaganda” Campaign Against Sanders
Video: BREAKING Democrats Will Be Campaigning Against Hillary Clinton
Democrats Are Still Divided on Israel, But Clinton Runs Way to the Right
Democrats Adopt a More Progressive Tone
Ralph Nader – Why Democrats Lose
Video: Part 2: Clinton vs. Bernie Debate: As Turmoil Rocks Democrats, How Can Progressives...
Video: Part 1: Clinton vs. Bernie Debate: As Turmoil Rocks Democrats, How Can Progressives...
Hillary’s Strategy: Snub Liberal Democrats, Move Right to Nab Anti-Trump Republicans
Trump tries to divide Democrats over Clinton's running mate
Video: 60 Black Democrats Sign Letter in AIPAC-Backed Effort to Discredit Cornel West and...
Video: Democrats Reject Sanders Opposition to TPP
TPP becomes wedge issue for Democrats ahead of national convention
The Democrats Ignore the 500-Pound Lobbyist in the Room
Pity the Poor Democrats!
Video: Progressive Democrats of America Executive Director: We Will Not Endorse Clinton
Senate Democrats block Zika funding bill over GOP provisions
Hillary Clinton escapes censure from House Democrats over Benghazi scandal
The Hypocrisy of the Democrats' Sit-In Stunt
Democrats Wrap Up Occupation of House, Continue Embrace of Bush National Security Policies
Democrats’ Politics of Fraud Produces No More Gun Safety
Democrats end House sit-in protest over gun control
After Orlando, Democrats and Republicans Clamor for Expanded Police State
The Democrats’ ‘Super-Delegate’ Mistake
Trump to meet with NRA over Democrats’ gun control proposal
Democrats Are Now the Aggressive War Party
Democrats now controlled by oil-funded lobbying companies
With the Trans-Pacific Partnership, It's Obama and the GOP vs. the Democrats
Democrats in Dis-Array
Democrats Can’t Unite Unless Wasserman Schultz Goes
Bill Clinton Brought Democrats Back to Life: A Zombie Idea That Won’t Die
Democrats, Too Clever by Half on Clinton
Maine Democrats eliminate power of superdelegates in convention vote (VIDEO)
Maine Democrats to vote on eliminating superdelegates
Democrats move to shut down criticism of Clinton’s Wall Street ties
Is Hillary Clinton the Democrats’ Richard Nixon?
Democrats March Toward Cliff
Democrats March Toward Cliff
Clinton leads Sanders with double digits among New York Democrats – poll
Time for These Two Democrats to Go
Why Democrats’ Super-Tuesday Results Aren’t Conclusive
All Polls Show Sanders as the Strongest Candidate to Win Presidency, but Democrats Likely...
Video: Guilt Abounds: Democrats and Republicans Struggle to Clean Up Their Image Over Flint’s...
Democrats in ‘Group Think’ Land
Common Dreams: For Democrats, Debate Night Means Being Quizzed From the Right by Corporate...
Republican Candidates Defend Killing Civilians to Fight Terrorism–and So Do Democrats
For Democrats, Debate Night Means Being Quizzed From the Right by Corporate Media
47 Democrats Join with House GOP to Refuse Suffering Refugees
Video: Desperate Democrats in Iowa (report By Jason Lester and Nimrod Kamer)
Democrats Depend on Affluent Voters? That’s Rich
Pennsylvania: Democrats move to cut state worker and teacher pensions
AIPAC targeting vulnerable Democrats over Iran agreement: Analyst
Video: Democrats Don’t Give A Damn About Black People
Video: “These Should Not Be in America”: Democrats Aim to Remove Confederate Symbols from...
Video: As Democrats Walk Out on Obama’s TPP Deal, Where Does Presidential Candidate Hillary...
Video: House Democrats Defeat TPP For Now
As Fast Track Vote Approaches in House, Democrats May Have Last Word
Chicago Democrats prepare new attacks on public education
Democrats’ Cave-In on TPP and TTIP. Good-Bye Democracy.
Why Hillary Clinton Would Be a Weak Presidential Nominee for Democrats
The Real Reason Democrats Lost Big on Election Day
The Democrats Got What They Deserved
The End of Free Speech: FEC Democrats Move to Kill Political Dissent
‘Decriminalize all drugs’ say Liberal Democrats
Obama and the Democrats: The Lesser of Two Evils is Still Evil
Can U.S. Democrats Salvage Their Party and Country?
Republicans Rule Out Obama-Impeachment. But Democrats.. We’ll See:
Only 14% of Americans Sympathize with Palestinians. 73% of Republicans — and 44% of...
Treasonous Democrats Blocked Impeachment of Bush & Cheney for Political Reasons, Says Prof. Francis...
The Democrats’ New Fake Populism
Democrats Shred Obama, Call Him ‘Detached,’ ‘Flat Footed,’ ‘Incompetent’
Democrats in Panic Over New Benghazi Hearings
MSNBC: Cherry Picking News Issues to Make Toxic Democrats Look Good
Democrats attack the unemployed and the poor
Democrats urge Obama to drop proposal
Colo. Democrats blamed for $80M hit to economy by pushing out gun firm Magpul
Senate Democrats Plan Fast-Track Fix to Reinstate Lost Unemployment Benefits
Democrats’ Moral-Political Bankruptcy
Democrats condemn NSA surveillance
The Democrats and Clemency
The Democrats and Clemency
Democrats Persecute Homeschooling Parents
Christian Democrats, Social Democrats form new German grand coalition goverment
House Democrats and Republicans Mostly Agree on Austerity
Corporate Democrats in DC Already in Freakout Mode That Liz Warren Is a Threat...
Democrats to undermine Obama on Iran
Bye-bye, Fake Liberals: The Warren Democrats Are Winning!
The Democrats Get Desperate
Who’s Least Critical of NSA Spying? Democrats
CBS Poll: 84% of Democrats Want ObamaCare Changed or Repealed
Reid, Democrats trigger ‘nuclear’ option; eliminate most filibusters on nominees
Who’s Least Critical of NSA Syping? Democrats
Senate Democrats eliminate filibusters for most presidential nominations
Elizabeth Warren — The Quiet Revolutionary Who Could Challenge Hillary Clinton in Democrats’ 2016...
Obama faces defections from Democrats
‘Even Democrats don’t trust Obama’
Dozens of Democrats back Republican anti-Obamacare bill
Are The Democrats Really “The Peace Party”. A Bi-Partisan Foreign Policy. The War at...
Democrats to Target Tax ‘Loopholes’—But Not for Fossil Fuel Industry
BETRAYED: Democrats now admit they knew all along that millions would lose their existing...
Democrats Call for Elimination of Tea Party
German Social Democrats’ convention backs coalition talks with conservative parties
German Social Democrats, conservatives agree on talks to form coalition government
“Economic Repression”: Obama, Democrats offer Deeper Social Cuts in New Budget Talks
Obama, Democrats offer deeper social cuts in new budget talks
Democrats can’t defend US from GOP
President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker John Boehner
The Congress, that polls show the American people would like to replace in its entirety, has “kicked the can down the road” again, putting off the government shutdown until January 15th and another debt ceiling showdown until February 7th.
The polls also show, convincingly, that people blame the stubborn Republicans more than the Democrats for the adverse effects of the impasse on workers, public health, safety, consumer spending, recreational parks and government corporate contracts.
There is another story about how all this gridlock came to be, fronted by the question: “Why didn’t the Democrats landslide the cruelest, most ignorant, big-business-indentured Republican Party in its history during the 2010 and 2012 Congressional elections?
There are a number of answers to this fundamental political question. First and most obvious is that the Democrats are dialing for the same commercial campaign dollars, which beyond the baggage of quid pro quo money, detours the Party away from concentrating on their constituents’ needs, in a contrasting manner with the GOP.
Democrats like Rep. Marcy Kaptur (Dem. Ohio) tell me that when the House Democrats get together in an election year, they go into the meetings talking about money and walk out talking about money, burdened with the quotas assigned by their so-called leadership.
Last year, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (Dem. Calif.) was reported to have attended 400 fundraisers in DC and around the country for her campaigning Democrats. Helping Democratic candidates with fundraising is a major way she asserts her control over them. Over ninety percent of the Democrats in the House defer to her and do not press her on such matters as upping the federal minimum wage, controlling corporate crime, reducing corporate welfare giveaways, reasserting full Medicare for all, diminishing a militaristic foreign policy and other policies reputed to be favored by the Party’s Progressive Caucus, numbering 75 Representatives. Instead, the Progressive Caucus remains moribund, declining to press their policy demands on leader Pelosi, as the hardcore Tea Partiers do with their leaders.
So when election time comes around, voters do not know what the Democrats stand for other than to save Social Security and Medicare from the Republicans. Former Senator and Presidential candidate Gary Hart, now living in Denver, said last year that the local Democrats in Denver didn’t know what the national Democrats stood for.
The 2010 election was crucial for the winners in the state government races who gained the upper hand in redistricting decisions for a decade. That meant more gerrymandered one-party dominated districts. The Republicans won a majority of those gubernatorial and state legislative races and took over the US House of Representatives with Speaker John Boehner (Rep. Ohio) and his curled-lip deputy, Eric Cantor (Rep. Va.).
And there is also President Obama’s political selfishness. Obama knew that he could not govern with a knee-jerk blocking Republican House of Representatives. Yet he did not provide serious campaign support and progressive policy leadership for Democratic candidates. Consequently he was overcome in 2011 by the Republican demands for sharp cuts in federal budgets serving people, while exempting corporate entitlements from similar cuts, and the specter of government shutdowns and Republicans in Congress refusing to raise the government’s debt ceiling to pay current debts, during his first term Presidency.
So you’d think that in 2012 President Obama would run arm-in-arm with Congressional Democrats. No way. He not only signaled his “going it alone” approach by turning down a Democrat’s request for $30 million from his billion dollar campaign hoard, but he had little interest in campaigning with the local Congressional candidates as he travelled around the country. The House Democrats were dismayed, but kept quiet.
So he got the Boehner/Cantor duo for another two years after the 2012 election. That meant another shut-the-government-down don’t-lift-the-debt-ceiling imbroglio - a clash that crowded out all the necessities and the matters of justice that our government is supposed to champion. The greed and power of the Walmarts, the Exxons, the Aetnas, the Lockheed Martins and the rest of the global corporate power structure that has turned its back on taxpaying, American workers and their families remains unchecked by our government.
Fast forward to the elections of 2014. No House Democrat believed, until the recent Congressional impasse, that the Democrats would win back the House in 2014. Given that many House-passed Republican votes since 2011 sided with big business, on the wrong side of fair treatment of children, student borrowers, workers, women, consumers, small taxpayers and providing necessary public services, one would think the Democrats should win next year in a slam dunk. Not likely, unless the Republican echo chamber, with its “mad dog” extremists, hand control of the House to the Democrats.
From the Nineteen Forties to the Nineteen Nineties, the Republican Party did not behave as badly as today’s snarling version of the GOP. Yet the Democrats beat Republicans in most Congressional races. Imagine what Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson would have done with today’s crop of Republican corporatists and rabid ideologues.
Today’s Democrats with very few exceptions are dull, tired and defeatist. They regularly judge themselves by how bad the Republican Party is, instead of how affirmatively good they could be for our country and its politically alienated people. They cannot even muster themselves to battle for a higher minimum wage on behalf of 30 million American workers, just to the level of 1968, inflation adjusted, which is supported by over 70 percent of the people.
Neither Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, nor House Democratic Leader, Nancy Pelosi are really taking this minimum wage fairness issue to the people and directly confronting the Republican Party. Yet they both profess to believe in “catching up with 1968.” They just don’t believe in themselves enough to generate the focused energy to make it happen.
AGB/AGB
The Democrats Can’t Defend the Country from the Retrograde GOP
The Congress, that polls show the American people would like to replace in its entirety, has “kicked the can down the road” again, putting off the government shutdown until January 15th and another debt ceiling showdown until February 7th.
The polls also show, convincingly, that people blame the stubborn Republicans more than the Democrats for the adverse effects of the impasse on workers, public health, safety, consumer spending, recreational parks and government corporate contracts.
There is another story about how all this gridlock came to be, fronted by the question: “Why didn’t the Democrats landslide the cruelest, most ignorant, big-business-indentured Republican Party in its history during the 2010 and 2012 Congressional elections? (See “The Do Nothing Congress: A Record of Extremism and Partisanship”)
There are a number of answers to this fundamental political question. First and most obvious is that the Democrats are dialing for the same commercial campaign dollars, which beyond the baggage of quid pro quo money, detours the Party away from concentrating on their constituents’ needs, in a contrasting manner with the GOP.
Democrats like Rep. Marcy Kaptur (Dem. Ohio) tell me that when the House Democrats get together in an election year, they go into the meetings talking about money and walk out talking about money, burdened with the quotas assigned by their so-called leadership.
Last year, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (Dem. Calif.) was reported to have attended 400 fundraisers in DC and around the country for her campaigning Democrats. Helping Democratic candidates with fundraising is a major way she asserts her control over them. Over ninety percent of the Democrats in the House defer to her and do not press her on such matters as upping the federal minimum wage, controlling corporate crime, reducing corporate welfare giveaways, reasserting full Medicare for all, diminishing a militaristic foreign policy and other policies reputed to be favored by the Party’s Progressive Caucus, numbering 75 Representatives. Instead, the Progressive Caucus remains moribund, declining to press their policy demands on leader Pelosi, as the hardcore Tea Partiers do with their leaders.
So when election time comes around, voters do not know what the Democrats stand for other than to save Social Security and Medicare from the Republicans. Former Senator and Presidential candidate Gary Hart, now living in Denver, said last year that the local Democrats in Denver didn’t know what the national Democrats stood for.
The 2010 election was crucial for the winners in the state government races who gained the upper hand in redistricting decisions for a decade. That meant more gerrymandered one-party dominated districts. The Republicans won a majority of those gubernatorial and state legislative races and took over the U.S. House of Representatives with Speaker John Boehner (Rep. Ohio) and his curled-lip deputy, Eric Cantor (Rep. Va.).
And there is also President Obama’s political selfishness. Obama knew that he could not govern with a knee-jerk blocking Republican House of Representatives. Yet he did not provide serious campaign support and progressive policy leadership for Democratic candidates. Consequently he was overcome in 2011 by the Republican demands for sharp cuts in federal budgets serving people, while exempting corporate entitlements from similar cuts, and the spectre of government shutdowns and Republicans in Congress refusing to raise the government’s debt ceiling to pay current debts, during his first term Presidency.
So you’d think that in 2012 President Obama would run arm-in-arm with Congressional Democrats. No way. He not only signaled his “going it alone” approach by turning down a Democrat’s request for $30 million from his billion dollar campaign hoard, but he had little interest in campaigning with the local Congressional candidates as he travelled around the country. The House Democrats were dismayed, but kept quiet.
So he got the Boehner/Cantor duo for another two years after the 2012 election. That meant another shut-the-government-down don’t-lift-the-debt-ceiling imbroglio – a clash that crowded out all the necessities and the matters of justice that our government is supposed to champion. The greed and power of the Walmarts, the Exxons, the Aetnas, the Lockheed Martins and the rest of the global corporate power structure that has turned its back on taxpaying, American workers and their families remains unchecked by our government.
Fast forward to the elections of 2014. No House Democrat believed, until the recent Congressional impasse, that the Democrats would win back the House in 2014. Given that many House-passed Republican votes since 2011 sided with big business, on the wrong side of fair treatment of children, student borrowers, workers, women, consumers, small taxpayers and providing necessary public services, one would think the Democrats should win next year in a slam dunk. Not likely, unless the Republican echo chamber, with its “mad dog” extremists, hand control of the House to the Democrats.
From the Nineteen Forties to the Nineteen Nineties, the Republican Party did not behave as badly as today’s snarling version of the GOP. Yet the Democrats beat Republicans in most Congressional races. Imagine what Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson would have done with today’s crop of Republican corporatists and rabid ideologues.
Today’s Democrats with very few exceptions are dull, tired and defeatist. They regularly judge themselves by how bad the Republican Party is, instead of how affirmatively good they could be for our country and its politically alienated people. They cannot even muster themselves to battle for a higher minimum wage on behalf of 30 million American workers, just to the level of 1968, inflation adjusted, which is supported by over 70 percent of the people.
Neither Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, nor House Democratic Leader, Nancy Pelosi are really taking this minimum wage fairness issue to the people and directly confronting the Republican Party. Yet they both profess to believe in “catching up with 1968.” They just don’t believe in themselves enough to generate the focused energy to make it happen.
(For those readers interested in letting their members of Congress have an earful, the switchboard is 202-224-3121.)
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.
Democrats Raise Their Ante
Democrats Raise Their Ante
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/democrats_raise_their_ante_20131015/
Posted on Oct 15, 2013
By Eugene Robinson
A crazy thing is happening in shuttered, dysfunctional Washington: Democrats are pushing back.
This phenomenon is so novel and disorienting that many Republicans in Congress, especially the tea party bullies, seem unable to grasp what’s going on. They keep expecting President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to fold like a cheap suit because, well, such a thing has happened before. I guess it’s understandable that the GOP might have forgotten the difference between bluffing and actually holding a winning hand.
Late last week, Reid began demanding that Republicans not only reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling but that they also make concessions on the draconian, irrational-by-design budget cuts known as sequestration. In political terms, he is demanding that the GOP pay a price for putting the country through all this needless drama.
Suddenly, Republicans who thought it was fine to hold the government and the economy hostage in order to nullify a duly enacted law—the Affordable Care Act—are shocked that Democrats would even suggest tampering with another duly enacted law: the Budget Control Act of 2011, which established the “sequester” cuts.
Was Reid moving the goal posts? Of course he was. That’s what negotiators do when they have the upper hand.
It seemed clear from the beginning that House Republicans had overreached by shutting down the government in an attempt to block the health insurance reforms popularly known as Obamacare. For one thing, many of the Affordable Care Act’s provisions were already in force. For another, any residual questions about the law had been thoroughly litigated in last year’s election.
Indeed, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday pronounced a devastating verdict: Fifty-three percent of those surveyed blamed Republicans for the shutdown, as opposed to 31 percent who blamed Obama—a worse pounding for the GOP than the party suffered when Newt Gingrich shut down the government during the Clinton administration. A separate survey by Gallup showed the Republican Party with an approval rating of just 28 percent, the lowest the firm has ever measured for either party.
Such stunning numbers not only threaten to dash the GOP’s hopes of winning control of the Senate next year but also challenge the party’s ability to hold its majority in the House.
So there’s no question who’s winning and who’s losing. Still, it’s refreshing to see Democrats act accordingly.
The standard pattern since Republicans captured the House in 2010 goes something like this: House Speaker John Boehner makes outrageous demands. Obama negotiates a “compromise” package heavily weighted toward Republican priorities, but Boehner can’t deliver his caucus. Fearful that tea party vandals might burn down the house, Democrats end up agreeing to a short-term deal that gives the GOP much of what it wants.
It is understandable that the activist Republican base might think victory through blackmail was the natural order of things. It’s not. It’s a distortion of American democracy that weakens the nation, and it has to end.
The fact that the GOP controls the House means that its views cannot be ignored. But the fact that Democrats control the Senate and the White House means that Republicans have no right to expect that they will always get their way. This concept of basic fairness is the sort of thing most of us learned in second grade. Apparently, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was not paying attention.
Before the tea party tantrum that caused the shutdown, Democrats had already agreed to sequester-level government funding of $986 billion—the number that Republicans insisted on. Because of sequestration, funding will suffer a further $21 billion cut in January. Last week, as the Senate struggled to clean up the mess that the House majority had made, Reid said hold on a minute.
Senate Democrats now want only a brief extension at the sequester level, along with further negotiations that could raise government funding closer to $1.058 trillion, the number they originally sought.
Republicans reacted with shock and horror, most of it feigned. This is the way politics is supposed to work. Obama and Reid are now in a position to win gracefully by compromising on their new spending demands. Republicans could then portray the outcome as something other than a rout—and hope the focus on spending makes the hypercaffeinated GOP base forget about that whole Obamacare-is-the-devil thing.
This should be a lesson: When you negotiate from strength, you’re not only helping yourself. You’re helping your adversary too.
Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.
© 2013, Washington Post Writers Group
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Why Republicans are Disciplined and Democrats Aren’t
Call for Democrats to Investigate ongoing danger from Fukushima nuclear reactors
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Bipartisan Victory as Republicans and Democrats Agree Poor People Should Go Hungry
Why Democrats Can’t be Trusted to Control Wall Street
High Crimes: Half Of Americans Want Obama Impeached (Including Democrats!)
Watch: Jon Stewart Tears into Racist and Sexist Democrats
Democrats Agreeing to Cut Social Security and Medicare
Robert Reich just wrote the piece “Selling the Store: Why Democrats Shouldn’t Put Social Security and Medicare on the Table,” which states: “Prominent Democrats — including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation.
“This is even before they’ve started budget negotiations with Republicans — who still refuse to raise taxes on the rich, close tax loopholes the rich depend on (such as hedge-fund and private-equity managers’ “carried interest”), increase capital gains taxes on the wealthy, cap their tax deductions, or tax financial transactions.
“It’s not the first time Democrats have led with a compromise, but these particular pre-concessions are especially unwise.”
MAX RICHTMAN, PAMELA CAUSEY [email]
Richtman is president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. Causey is communications director of the group. Today Richtman wrote a letter to Obama that his pledges regarding Social Security have been “contradicted by statements made in recent months that both the chained CPI and Medicare means-testing remain a part of your deficit reduction proposal. The ‘chained CPI’ is not a ‘technical tweak, and no amount of rationalization can make it so. In reality, the chained CPI is a benefit cut for the oldest and most vulnerable Americans who would be least able to afford it. To offer to trade it away outside the context of a comprehensive Social Security solvency proposal ignores the fact that Social Security does not even belong in this debate because it does not contribute to the deficit. Cutting Social Security benefits to reduce the deficit is unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans across all ages and political affiliation.
“Likewise, we are concerned about proposals to raise the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 and to increase the Social Security full retirement age from 67 to 69. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone is living longer or is able to work into their late 60s. While life expectancy has risen six years in the top half of income earners, workers in the bottom half have only gained 1.3 years. What is more, the bottom 40 percent of income earners depend on Social Security for nearly 90 percent of their total income. Benefit cuts through the chained CPI and delaying access to Medicare for millions of Americans would harm seniors, people with disabilities and children; and have a disproportionately negative affect on women and communities of color.
“When taken together, these benefit cuts will generate a tsunami of seniors living in poverty. …”
Why Democrats Shouldn’t Put Social Security and Medicare on the Table
Why Democrats Shouldn’t Put Social Security and Medicare on the Table
Posted on Mar 21, 2013
By Robert Reich
This post originally ran on Robert Reich’s Web page.
Prominent Democrats — including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation.
This is even before they’ve started budget negotiations with Republicans — who still refuse to raise taxes on the rich, close tax loopholes the rich depend on (such as hedge-fund and private-equity managers’ “carried interest”), increase capital gains taxes on the wealthy, cap their tax deductions, or tax financial transactions.
It’s not the first time Democrats have led with a compromise, but these particular pre-concessions are especially unwise.
For over thirty years Republicans have pitted the middle class against the poor, preying on the frustrations and racial biases of average working people who can’t get ahead no matter how hard they try. In the Republican narrative, government takes from the hard-working middle and gives to the undeserving and dependent needy.
In reality, average working people have been stymied because almost all the economic gains of the last three decades have gone to the very top. The middle has lost bargaining power as unions have shriveled. American politics has been flooded with campaign contributions from corporations and the wealthy, which have used their clout to reduce marginal tax rates, widen loopholes, loosen regulations, gain subsidies, and obtain government bailouts when their bets turn sour.Now five years after the worst downturn since the Great Depression and the biggest bailout in history, the stock market has recouped its losses and corporate profits constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929. Yet the real median wage continues to fall — wages now claim the lowest share of the economy on record — and inequality is still widening. All the economic gains since the trough of the recession have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans; the bottom 90 percent continue to lose ground.
What looks like the start of a more buoyant recovery is a sham because the vast majority of Americans have neither the pay nor access to credit that allows them to buy enough to boost the economy. Housing prices and starts are being fueled by investors with easy money rather than would-be home buyers with mortgages. The Fed’s low interest rates have pushed other investors into stocks by default, creating an artificial bull market.
If there was ever a time for the Democratic Party to champion working Americans and reverse these troubling trends, it is now — forging an alliance between the frustrated middle and the working poor. This need not be “class warfare” because a healthy economy is in everyone’s interest. The rich would do far better with a smaller share of a rapidly-growing economy than a ballooning share of one that’s growing at a snail’s pace and a stock market that’s turning into a bubble.
But the modern Democratic Party can’t bring itself to do this. It’s too dependent on the short-term, insular demands of Wall Street, corporate executives, and the wealthy.
It was Bill Clinton, after all, who pushed for repeal of Glass-Steagall, championed the North American Free Trade Act and the World Trade Organization without adequate safeguards for American jobs, and rented out the Lincoln Bedroom to a steady stream of rich executives.
And it was Barack Obama who continued George W. Bush’s Wall Street bailout with no strings attached; pushed a watered-down “Volcker Rule” (still delayed) rather than renew Glass-Steagall; failed to prosecute a single Wall Street executive or bank because, according to his Attorney General, Wall Street is just too big to jail; and permanently enshrined the Bush tax cuts for all but the top 2 percent.
Meanwhile, over the last several decades Democrats have allowed Social Security taxes to grow and its revenue stream to become almost as important a source of overall government funding as income taxes; turned their backs on organized labor and labor-law reforms that would have made it easier to form unions; and then, even as they bailed out Wall Street, neglected the burdens of middle-class homeowners who found themselves underwater and their homes worth less than what they paid for them because of the Street’s excesses.
In fairness, it could have been worse. Clinton did stand up to Gingrich. Obama did get the Affordable Care Act. Congressional Democrats have scored tactical victories against social conservatives and Tea Party radicals. But Democrats haven’t responded in any bold or meaningful way to the increasingly concentrated wealth and power, the steady demise of the middle class, and further impoverishment of the nation’s poor. The Party failed to become a movement to reclaim the economy and our democracy.
And now come their pre-concessions on Social Security and Medicare.
Technically, a “chained CPI” might be justifiable if seniors routinely substitute lower-cost alternatives as prices rise, as most other Americans do. But in reality, seniors pay 20 to 40 percent of their incomes for healthcare, including pharmaceuticals — the prices of which are rising much faster than inflation. So there’s no practical justification for reducing Social Security benefits on the assumption inflation isn’t really eating away at those benefits as much as the current cost-of-living adjustment allows.
Robert B. Reich, chancellor’s professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, was secretary of labor in the Clinton administration. Time magazine named him one of the 10 most effective Cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including the best-sellers “Aftershock” and “The Work of Nations.” His latest, “Beyond Outrage,” is now out in paperback. He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
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Democrats Also to Blame for Iraq War, Journalist Scahill Says
Democrats Also to Blame for Iraq War, Journalist Scahill Says
Posted on Mar 21, 2013
Screenshot |
Nation writer Jeremy Scahill ripped into Republicans and Democrats on the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, claiming that both parties are to blame for the war during a recent appearance on MSNBC.
“I don’t see this as the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War,” Scahill told Martin Bashir. “This was a war that started in 1991 and was waged consistently by the United States, and it was a bipartisan war.”
He argued that the key members of the Obama administration, including Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry, should have to answer for their actions in the runup to the conflict.
But Scahill also said that Bush administration officials such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith “should not be able to show their faces in public in this country without getting confronted with what they did to Iraq.” He later added that Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were not deserving of being given “any honor in this society. They should be held accountable for the U.S. soldiers who were killed and the many more than 100,000 Iraqis that were killed.”
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Selling the Store: Why Democrats Shouldn’t Put Social Security and Medicare on the Table
Prominent Democrats — including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last week she's willing to consider cuts to Social Security as part of a sweeping deficit-reduction package, the so-called 'Grand Bargain.'. (Photo: File)
This is even before they’ve started budget negotiations with Republicans — who still refuse to raise taxes on the rich, close tax loopholes the rich depend on (such as hedge-fund and private-equity managers’ “carried interest”), increase capital gains taxes on the wealthy, cap their tax deductions, or tax financial transactions.
It’s not the first time Democrats have led with a compromise, but these particular pre-concessions are especially unwise.
For over thirty years Republicans have pitted the middle class against the poor, preying on the frustrations and racial biases of average working people who can’t get ahead no matter how hard they try. In the Republican narrative, government takes from the hard-working middle and gives to the undeserving and dependent needy.
In reality, average working people have been stymied because almost all the economic gains of the last three decades have gone to the very top. The middle has lost bargaining power as unions have shriveled. American politics has been flooded with campaign contributions from corporations and the wealthy, which have used their clout to reduce marginal tax rates, widen loopholes, loosen regulations, gain subsidies, and obtain government bailouts when their bets turn sour.
Now five years after the worst downturn since the Great Depression and the biggest bailout in history, the stock market has recouped its losses and corporate profits constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929. Yet the real median wage continues to fall — wages now claim the lowest share of the economy on record — and inequality is still widening. All the economic gains since the trough of the recession have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans; the bottom 90 percent continue to lose ground.
If there was ever a time for the Democratic Party to champion working Americans and reverse these troubling trends, it is now — forging an alliance between the frustrated middle and the working poor.
What looks like the start of a more buoyant recovery is a sham because the vast majority of Americans have neither the pay nor access to credit that allows them to buy enough to boost the economy. Housing prices and starts are being fueled by investors with easy money rather than would-be home buyers with mortgages. The Fed’s low interest rates have pushed other investors into stocks by default, creating an artificial bull market.
If there was ever a time for the Democratic Party to champion working Americans and reverse these troubling trends, it is now — forging an alliance between the frustrated middle and the working poor. This need not be “class warfare” because a healthy economy is in everyone’s interest. The rich would do far better with a smaller share of a rapidly-growing economy than a ballooning share of one that’s growing at a snail’s pace and a stock market that’s turning into a bubble.
But the modern Democratic Party can’t bring itself to do this. It’s too dependent on the short-term, insular demands of Wall Street, corporate executives, and the wealthy.
It was Bill Clinton, after all, who pushed for repeal of Glass-Steagall, championed the North American Free Trade Act and the World Trade Organization without adequate safeguards for American jobs, and rented out the Lincoln Bedroom to a steady stream of rich executives.
And it was Barack Obama who continued George W. Bush’s Wall Street bailout with no strings attached; pushed a watered-down “Volcker Rule” (still delayed) rather than renew Glass-Steagall; failed to prosecute a single Wall Street executive or bank because, according to his Attorney General, Wall Street is just too big to jail; and permanently enshrined the Bush tax cuts for all but the top 2 percent.
Meanwhile, over the last several decades Democrats have allowed Social Security taxes to grow and its revenue stream to become almost as important a source of overall government funding as income taxes; turned their backs on organized labor and labor-law reforms that would have made it easier to form unions; and then, even as they bailed out Wall Street, neglected the burdens of middle-class homeowners who found themselves underwater and their homes worth less than what they paid for them because of the Street’s excesses.
In fairness, it could have been worse. Clinton did stand up to Gingrich. Obama did get the Affordable Care Act. Congressional Democrats have scored tactical victories against social conservatives and Tea Party radicals. But Democrats haven’t responded in any bold or meaningful way to the increasingly concentrated wealth and power, the steady demise of the middle class, and further impoverishment of the nation’s poor. The Party failed to become a movement to reclaim the economy and our democracy.
And now come their pre-concessions on Social Security and Medicare.
Technically, a “chained CPI” might be justifiable if seniors routinely substitute lower-cost alternatives as prices rise, as most other Americans do. But in reality, seniors pay 20 to 40 percent of their incomes for healthcare, including pharmaceuticals — the prices of which are rising much faster than inflation. So there’s no practical justification for reducing Social Security benefits on the assumption inflation isn’t really eating away at those benefits as much as the current cost-of-living adjustment allows.
Likewise, although a case can be made for reducing the Medicare benefits of higher-income beneficiaries, as a practical matter their savings are almost as vulnerable to rising healthcare costs as are the more modest savings of middle-income retirees. “Means-testing” Medicare also runs the risk of transforming it into a program for the “less fortunate,” which can undermine its political support.
Medicare for all, or even a public option for Medicare, would give the program enough clout to demand health providers move from a fee-for-service system to one that paid instead for healthy outcomes.
In short, Medicare isn’t the problem. The underlying problem is the sky-rocketing costs of health care. Because Medicare’s administrative costs are a fraction of those of private health insurance, Medicare might be part of the solution. Medicare for all, or even a public option for Medicare, would give the program enough clout to demand health providers move from a fee-for-service system to one that paid instead for healthy outcomes.
With healthcare costs under better control, retirees wouldn’t be paying a large and growing portion of their incomes for healthcare — which would alleviate pressure on Social Security. I’m still not convinced a “chained CPI” is necessary, though. A preferable alternative would be to raise the ceiling on the portion of income subject to Social Security taxes (now $113,600).
Besides, Social Security and Medicare are the most popular programs ever devised by the federal government, which is why Republicans hate them so much. If average Americans have trusted the Democratic Party to do one thing it has been to guard these programs from the depredations of the GOP.
Putting these two programs “on the table” is also tantamount to accepting the most insidious and dishonest of all Republican claims: That for too long most Americans have been living beyond their means; that we are rapidly approaching a day of reckoning when we can no longer afford these generous “entitlements;” and that prudence and responsibility dictate that we must now begin to live within our means and cut back these projected expenditures, particularly if we are to have any money left to invest in the young and the disadvantaged.
The truth is the opposite: That for three decades the means of most Americans have been stagnant even though the overall economy has more than doubled in size; that because almost all the gains from growth have gone to the top, most Americans haven’t been able to save enough for retirement or the rising costs of healthcare; and that because of this, Social Security and Medicare are barely adequate as is.
Democrats shouldn’t succumb the lie that the elderly and young are in competition for a portion of a shrinking pie, when in fact the pie is larger than ever. It’s just that those who have the largest and fastest-growing portions refuse to share it.
Paul Ryan’s House Republican budget takes on Medicare, but leaves Social Security alone. Why should Democrats lead the charge on either?
The Republicans are already slashing help for the young and the disadvantaged. Democrats shouldn’t succumb the lie that the elderly and young are in competition for a portion of a shrinking pie, when in fact the pie is larger than ever. It’s just that those who have the largest and fastest-growing portions refuse to share it.
We are the richest nation in the history of the world — richer now than we’ve ever been. But an increasing share of that wealth is held by a smaller and smaller share of the population, who have, in effect, bribed legislators to reduce their taxes and provide loopholes so they pay even less.
The budget deficit “crisis” has been manufactured by them to distract our attention from this overriding fact, and to pit the rest of us against each other for a smaller and smaller share of what remains. Democrats should not conspire.
Needy children should be getting far more help, better pre-school care, better nutrition. Seniors need better healthcare coverage and more Social Security. All Americans need better schools and improved infrastructure.
The richest nation in the history of the world should be able to respond to the legitimate needs of all its citizens.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including his latest best-seller, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future; The Work of Nations; Locked in the Cabinet; Supercapitalism; and his newest, Beyond Outrage. His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org.
Appointing Senators, Be They Republicans or Democrats, Is Wrong
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has rejected former Congressman Barney Frank’s request that he be appointed to fill the vacancy created by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. (Photo: Rappaport Center via Flickr)Senator John Kerry’s resignation to serve as secretary of state. Despite the fact that progressive groups urged the Frank pick for the temporary slot—arguing that the former congressman could play a critical, perhaps definitional, role in budget fights over cutting Pentagon waste and taxing speculators—the governor instead picked his former chief of staff.
The new senator, William “Mo” Cowan, has long been close to the governor, having formerly served as Patrick’s legal counsel. He’s experienced, capable and politically connected, a well-regarded lawyer who has worked not just with Patrick but also with former Governor Mitt Romney (whom Cowan helped identify judicial picks). He’ll be the state’s second African-American senator, after liberal Republican Ed Brooke, who served in the 1960s and 1970s. As a lawyer, Cowan has been active with the American Constitution Society—joining in the society’s “work to advance the progressive values and principles of the U.S. Constitution”—which counts for a lot with Americans who seek to challenge right-wing judicial activism.
But, as with his selection of former Democratic National Committee Paul Kirk to fill the interim vacancy created by the death of Senator Edward Kennedy, Patrick has gone with a connected insider rather than someone who is likely to shake things up in the Senate.
Patrick says he’s now got “a valued ally” in the Senate.
And there is no reason to doubt that this is the case.
But, of course, this is the problem with letting governors, be they Republicans or Democrats, appoint US senators. The Massachusetts circumstance is less troublesome than in states such as Hawaii and South Carolina, which will be represented for more than two years by recently appointed senators. A special election in June will replace Cowan with a senator chosen by the voters.
But gubernatorial appointments of senators, be they for a few months, or for a few years, make the United States Senate, never a perfectly representative body, a good deal less representative.
Cowan will join three appointed senators in the chamber during what Barney Frank correctly identified as a particularly critical period in the chamber.
Another new senator, Tim Scott, has been appointed by South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, rather than elected by the people of that state. The same goes for Brian Schatz, Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie’s pick to fill the vacancy created by the death of Senator Dan Inouye.
Cowan, Schatz and Scott come from different parties and different ideological backgrounds. There is every reason to believe they will serve honorably, and ably. Progressives are already excited by some of what Schatz has done, while conservatives are enthusiastic about Scott.
But none of these details change the fact that a trio of unelected senators will be powerful, perhaps even definitional, figures in what is supposed to be a representative body. They will play critical roles in deciding whether to approve or reject cabinet nominees and Supreme Court selections, they will vote on tax policies and budget measures and they will decide whether to crack the “debt ceiling”—or send young men and women off to war. But they will do so without democratic legitimacy.
No member of Congress should serve without having been elected by the people of the district or state they represent.
Unfortunately, the new Senate will have at least three members who serve not as representatives but as mandarins—appointees assigned to positions by governors who have assumed dubious authority.
The point here ought not be to do disparage Cowan, Shatz or Scott.
The point is to raise a concern about the fact that more laws will be proposed, more filibusters will be sustained, more critical votes will be tipped in one direction or another by “senators” who never earned a single vote for the positions they are holding.
Why?
Because of a deliberate misreading of the vague 1913 amendment to the US Constitution that replaced the old system of appointing senators with one that said they were all supposed to be directly elected.
The Seventeenth Amendment sought to end the corrupt, and corrupting, process of appointing senators. But a loophole was included to give governors the authority to make temporary appointments. That meant that, while no one has ever been allowed to serve in the US House of Representatives without having first been elected, dozens of men and women have served in the Senate without having been elected. And those appointed senators often serve for two full years, as will South Carolina’s Scott and Hawaii’s Senator Schatz, both of whom will serve until at least 2015. To the end of the 113th Congress, senators chosen by individual governor in South Carolina and Hawaii will have the same authority as a senator elected by 7,748,994 voters (California Democrat Dianne Feinstein).
Former House Judiciacy Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-MI), rightly points out that this is a fundamental voting-rights issue. It is, as well, a question of “basic consistency in how our Representatives in Congress are elected.” Says Conyers: “The Constitution has always required that House vacancies be filled by election. The Senate should not be subject to a different standard. Americans should always have a direct say in who represents them in Congress—in both Houses, all of the time.”
Conyers was a key House backer of former US Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), when the then-chairman of the Senate Judiciacy Committee’s subcommittee on the Constitution tried to amend the Constitution to address the problem.
Feingold’s proposal, which would have required special elections to fill all Senate vacancies, got a little bit of traction when Feingold was still serving in the Senate. In 2009, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution approved Feingold’s proposed amendment to end gubernatorial appointments to vacant Senate seats.
Recalling a series of appointments following the 2008 election, Feingold said: “I applaud my colleagues on the subcommittee for passing the Senate Vacancies Amendment, which will end an anti-democratic process that denies voters the opportunity to determine who represents them in the US Senate. The nation witnessed four gubernatorial appointments to Senate seats earlier this year, some mired in controversy, and we will soon see another one in Texas. This will leave more than 20 percent of Americans represented by a senator whom they did not elect.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), was not enthusiastic about the amendment. He defended the appointment of senators, saying, “In the state of Nevada the governor appoints. Even though we have a Republican governor now I think that’s the way it should be so I don’t support his legislation.”
No one with a taste for democracy can possibly respect the majority leader’s position on appointed senators.
More thoughtful senators, including the number-two Democrat in the chamber, Illinoisan Dick Durbin, co-sponsored Feingold’s amendment.
Reid got that one wrong. Feingold got it right.
“It is time to finish the job started by the great progressive Bob La Follette of Wisconsin to require the direct election of senators,” the former senator from Wisconsin said in 2009. “No one can represent the American people in the House of Representatives without the approval of the voters. The same should be true for the Senate. I hope the full Senate Judiciary Committee will soon get the chance to consider this important constitutional amendment to entrust the people, not state governors, with the power to select U.S. senators.”
The worst deficit facing America is the democracy deficit.
It can be addressed, at least in part, by making the Senate a representative chamber.
Feingold can’t complete the process he began. But his former colleagues, led by Dick Durbin, should do so. As Durbin said several years ago when he chaired a hearing on the issue: “Over a half century ago, Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously said: ‘No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ The same might be said of special elections to fill vacant U.S. Senate seats—they are the worst way to fill such seats, except for all the others.”
© 2013 The Nation
Reacting to Reports of a Schumer Proposal, Campaign for America’s Future Warns Democrats: Do...
WASHINGTON - January 24 - In response to a report in The Hill that Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) may be floating a proposal that includes cuts to Social Security and Medicare, Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future made the following statement:
“If Sen. Schumer's proposal was accurately reported, the senator could not be more wrong. Just as President Obama declared in his inauguration speech that America does not have to cut Social Security or Medicare, Sen. Schumer reportedly offers up cuts to those crucial programs in vain hope of getting Republican support for tax increases. Just as Republican leaders have been forced to back away from threatening to crash the economy to force Democrats to accept cuts to Social Security and Medicare, Sen. Schumer capitulates to the hostage taking that Republicans appear to be abandoning.
“I hope the news reports are wrong because Sen. Schumer has previously been a strong opponent of cuts to Social Security. The Campaign for America’s Future reminds him and all Democrats that the chained CPI would mean an immediate cut to current Social Security benefits. These cuts are very unpopular with all Americans, and Democrats should be leading the fight to protect Social Security and Medicare, not helping Republicans accomplish their harmful goals.”
According to The Hill: “Schumer’s plan to enact tax reform through the budget process would ensure additional tax revenues would be matched by an equal amount in spending cuts.” And, “The joint budget resolution could also call for Medicare reforms and using the chained CPI formula to curb the cost of Social Security benefits.”
The Campaign for America’s Future is the strategy center for the progressive movement. Our goal is to forge the enduring progressive majority needed to realize the America of shared prosperity and equal opportunity that our country was meant to be.
Reacting to Reports of a Schumer Proposal, Campaign for America’s Future Warns Democrats: Do...
WASHINGTON - January 24 - In response to a report in The Hill that Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) may be floating a proposal that includes cuts to Social Security and Medicare, Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future made the following statement:
“If Sen. Schumer's proposal was accurately reported, the senator could not be more wrong. Just as President Obama declared in his inauguration speech that America does not have to cut Social Security or Medicare, Sen. Schumer reportedly offers up cuts to those crucial programs in vain hope of getting Republican support for tax increases. Just as Republican leaders have been forced to back away from threatening to crash the economy to force Democrats to accept cuts to Social Security and Medicare, Sen. Schumer capitulates to the hostage taking that Republicans appear to be abandoning.
“I hope the news reports are wrong because Sen. Schumer has previously been a strong opponent of cuts to Social Security. The Campaign for America’s Future reminds him and all Democrats that the chained CPI would mean an immediate cut to current Social Security benefits. These cuts are very unpopular with all Americans, and Democrats should be leading the fight to protect Social Security and Medicare, not helping Republicans accomplish their harmful goals.”
According to The Hill: “Schumer’s plan to enact tax reform through the budget process would ensure additional tax revenues would be matched by an equal amount in spending cuts.” And, “The joint budget resolution could also call for Medicare reforms and using the chained CPI formula to curb the cost of Social Security benefits.”
The Campaign for America’s Future is the strategy center for the progressive movement. Our goal is to forge the enduring progressive majority needed to realize the America of shared prosperity and equal opportunity that our country was meant to be.
Hard-Hitting Gun Violence Ads Go After NRA-Loving Democrats
I was on Mark Thompson's "Make It Plain" on Sirius XM last night (I'm on every Wednesday night), and we were talking about how urban people and rural people have such different opinions on guns because they have different experiences of guns. Urban gun violence is so random, and so interwoven with the drug trade (that's a whole other discussion), that city dwellers just want to make it stop. (Although the only time I've had a loaded gun pointed at me was in the suburbs, by an Iraqi vet having a PTSD episode. A little unnerving!)
So no, it's not that we want to take away your guns. We just want gun violence against other human beings to stop. We want better odds against being a victim, and against our children being victims. We love living in the city, but we don't want to be so afraid of guns.
I lived in this one apartment on a main city artery, with an iron gate across the front entrance, and I don't know that I would have moved in without it. Shortly after I moved in, a neighborhood woman was shot in the head from a stray bullet -- while she was asleep in her bed. (This was a few blocks from me.) I said to myself, "Well, my bedroom is in the back of the building, so I'm less likely to get hit." Because that's how you think when you live in the city.
Because I live in the city, there's part of me that still can't believe we even have to call our representatives and push for such a "controversial" idea as protecting children from gun violence. That the discussion in our country is so very slanted toward fear and paranoia, keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the severely mentally ill is what passes for radical.
That's why I'm happy that we have these outside groups to turn up the political heat. Check out this hard-hitting ad from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. They're now going after conservative Dems who support the NRA in opposing gun controls, and they're linking Rep. John Barrow's stance to the recent slaughter at Newtown:
One week ago, Barrow declared that “no new [gun] laws will have a big chance of passing in the House.” Yesterday, he commented on President Obama’s reform package, saying, “We need to find practical solutions to gun violence that are consistent with the Second Amendment, rather than having another political debate in Washington that divides Americans."
According to CSGV executive director Josh Horwitz, “Representative John Barrow has decided to put his love of the NRA above his concern for his fellow Americans. That is not acceptable.”
Noting that Barrow has received $27,250 in NRA campaign contributions over his eight-year congressional career, Horwitz added, “Rep. Barrow has been bought for the price of a new truck. It would be laughable if his lack of regard for our families’ safety wasn’t so dangerous.”
[...] The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence is encouraging concerned citizens to call Representative Barrow at (202) 225-2823 to tell him to support the President’s gun policy proposals.
The CSGV also went after the newly-elected Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) for calling the White House's effort to reform our gun laws "extreme."
The Heitkamp ads, signed by four parents who lost their children in mass shootings, stated "SHAME ON YOU." They urged Americans to call Senator Heitkamp to express their disgust, and enough of them did that Heitkamp changed her position, saying, "We have a responsibility to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill."
My point is, we can stop gun violence. Finally, the tide of public opinion is overwhelmingly with us. Call your reps, call your senators, write letters to the editor. Call talk radio. Get involved.
The time is now.
Complicated Politics: Democrats and the Grand Bargain
It is a well-known fact that President Obama wants a “grand bargain” with the Republicans, a deal that would reduce future deficits both by raising tax revenues and cutting spending, including on the so-called “entitlement programs”. He has offered this idea up repeatedly to Speaker Boehner and other Republican leaders in the 2011 debt ceiling talks and in the 2012 fiscal cliff debate, and media reports suggest that he is discussing the idea again with Republicans in the lead-up to the next perils of Pauline budget crisis in that is only a few weeks off.
Democrats in the progressive wing of the party (of which, full disclosure, I am a card-carrying member) think the idea of cutting Social Security, Medicare, and/or Medicaid benefits is terrible public policy because senior citizens who can least afford it will be badly hurt, and we have been working hard to convince the President to back away from this offer. This may be difficult to do, though, as the President has some strong (wrong, in my judgment, but compelling to the President’s political and legislative team) political reasons for wanting to do this grand bargain. But the politics of this deal are very different for the rest of the party, and it may well be that progressives can win over a lot more of those Democrats than conventional wisdom currently expects.
The Obama team’s logic is that they are sick and tired, understandably, of Republicans wanting to make every single issue, every policy debate, about the deficit issue, and they don’t want our country to keep lurching from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis as Republicans continue to look for “leverage” to force more cuts. And the White House, to their credit, is eager to move on to other issues that will move the country forward, such as immigration reform and gun safety issues. They believe that if they can finally close the deal and get the grand bargain they have been searching for, they will be on strong political ground to say, “Hey, we've already done something big on that, it’s time to move on.”
Now I happen to believe their logic is wrong on the politics of the issue, as Republicans’ strongest political issue by far is the deficit, and they will never give it up-- no matter what happens, they will keep demanding more and more cuts, and the deficit hawks in the media and well-funded groups like Fix The Debt will back them up. But even if you were to grant that the White House was right on the politics of this issue for them, for Democratic members of Congress the politics on this issue, the politics are completely different.
For starters, members of Congress are far more affected by what I call the intensity factor. Remember about 25 years ago when senior citizens surrounded Rep. Rostenkowski’s car and started rocking it back and forth because of a bill they didn’t like on catastrophic health care? Think what seniors today might do if their Social Security benefits were cut. That kind of intensity drives bad media coverage back home, primary challenges, contributions to opponents- and it kills your contributors’ and volunteers’ and base voters’ enthusiasm levels.
The threat of a primary is not as great on the Democratic side as on the Republicans, as the progressive movement has less money and capacity in general to mount many successful primary challenges. In the last several cycles, there has usually been one major primary challenge (some successful, some not) to an incumbent from the left, and that isn't enough to strike fear into most Democrats’ hearts. The intensity factor, though, might change the dynamics on this, adding new money and volunteers to primary fights. Add to that the combination of progressive forces with older voters who have just had their Social Security cut, and incumbent Democrats might have something to worry about, especially in states like PA, OH, MI, WI, and IA with both large numbers of seniors and large numbers of union members.
Beyond the primaries, though, the politics of cutting benefits is far worse for Democratic incumbents in an off year general election. Think about the demographics alone: in the past two Presidential elections, the percent of the electorate that came from voters 65 and over was 16%, whereas in the 2010 off-year election it jumped to 21%. And seniors have been one of the most volatile demographic groups in the electorate in recent years, and one not inclined to like Democrats very well: Democrats lost them by 8% in 2008, by a whopping 21% in 2010, and by 12% in 2012.
But seniors are far from the only worry with a bad vote on Social Security or Medicare. The voters that Democrats have to turn out in big numbers in an off-year are base voters. Base voters hate the idea of cutting Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, and a Democrat who had to defend that vote would be looking square in the face at a base voter constituency that was likely to be very depressed. I’ve lived through two off-year elections where Democratic base voters were unexcited about voting- 1994 and 2010- and I don’t relish living through that again.
What will be especially brutal in the off-year election for Democrats who believe they have cut a responsible bi-partisan deal that will protect them from Republican attacks is that the unaccountable outside groups with their millions of dollars in attack ads won’t hesitate to do brutal ads on them for cutting Social Security and Medicare, just as they did the last two elections attacking them for “cutting” Medicare. It won’t matter that the Republicans wanted to cut even more, or that the money for the ads comes from millionaires who would love to see these programs privatized: the attack dogs will not hesitate to make political hay off such a vote.
Beyond rank and file members of Congress, there is another major force in the Democratic party for whom a grand bargain is potentially deadly, and that is potential Presidential candidates. Try explaining your vote cutting Social Security to the heavily senior citizen and base activist-dominated Iowa caucuses. I've been involved in five different Presidential campaigns, and I feel pretty confident saying that it would be extremely tough to win a Democratic Presidential primary after voting to cut Social Security benefits.
Even if you grant that the politics of the grand bargain idea are good for President Obama, they are poison for Democrats in Congress who have to run again in 2014 and 2016. The President, who will never run for office again, may feel like his best political alternative is to ignore the wishes of both his base and the seniors who have never voted for him anyway on an issue like Social Security cuts. For the rest of the party, they had better take a close look at how this will affect their own political well-being.