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Ongoing Dem Debacle Thread: Commander will kill us all

MHBDemon said:
Bad look for Ellison:

https://splinternews.com/house-democrats-line-up-to-vote-en-masse-for-totally-un-1826115862
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Bad look for a lot of Dems, so many that it is easier to list out the ones who voted against the bill.

Nanette Barragan
Karen Bass
Earl Blumenauer
Yvette Clarke
Lacy Clay
Bonnie Watson Coleman
Mark James DeSaulnier
Bill Foster
Lois Frankel
Alcee Hastings
Pramila Jayapal
Eddie Bernie Johnson
Barbara Lee
Gwen Moore
Frank Pallone
Donald Payne
Mark Pocan
Jared Polis
Bobby Scott
Adam Smith
Paul Tonko
Pete Visclosky
Nydia Velazquez
Maxine Waters
 
http://www.kansascity.com/latest-news/article205372914.html

In the last year, McCaskill received more money from the financial services, insurance and real estate industries than any other lawmaker except House Speaker Paul Ryan, with a take of $1.6 million. Over the last five years, she received financial services donations that made her the No. 4 recipient among the 16 Democrats who voted to unburden the industry. Her $809,000 over that period also comes in ahead of her GOP counterpart, Sen. Roy Blunt, who received $801,307.
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Yeah. I think 2016 may have been a wake up call to progressives to get political in order to maintain a functioning government.
 
PhDeac said:
Yeah. I think 2016 may have been a wake up call to progressives to get political in order to maintain a functioning government.
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Given the political results beyond the presidential level over the past decade or so, it certainly does seem as if conservatives believe they're locked in a real war to the death with liberals and have been doing whatever it takes to win, while Democrats have been disorganized, complacent, and mentally and politically stuck in the 90s. Many liberals appear to think that, as long as they control the WH, everything else is fine, even if the Democratic Party as a whole suffers devastating losses at the local, state, and congressional levels. Bill Clinton did fine in his two elections in the 90s, but the Democrats suffered enormous losses at the congressional and state levels under his presidency, especially in 1994. Obama did fine in his two elections, but the Democrats suffered even greater losses elsewhere when he was president. The problem with this belief was exposed in 2016 - if you screw up and lose a presidential election, then you have nothing, because you're already out of power everyplace else. Hopefully, 2016 was the great wake-up call the party as a whole needed.
 
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http://thehill.com/homenews/house/390898-dem-leaders-embrace-pay-go

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other top Democrats are vowing to abide by fiscally hawkish pay-as-you-go rules if they seize the majority next year, rejecting calls from liberals who feel they’d be an impediment to big legislative gains.

Pelosi, who adopted “pay-go” rules when she held the Speaker’s gavel more than a decade ago, says she’ll push to do it again if the Democrats win the House in November’s midterm elections.

“Democrats are committed to pay-as-you-go,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said Tuesday, affirming the policy would be a 2019 priority.

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the minority whip, is also endorsing the notion that a Democratic majority should adopt the budget-neutral rules next year.


“The pay-go rule is a good rule and we ought to reinstitute it,” Hoyer told The Hill last week.

Yet the idea is already prompting howls from some liberals in the caucus, who want to pursue an ambitious legislative agenda next year — including costly, big-ticket items such as expanding health-care access, subsidizing education opportunities and boosting infrastructure projects — and fear pay-go might be too confining.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), said the Democrats would be foolish to adopt the fiscal restraints, especially in light of the Republicans’ newly adopted tax-reform law, which is estimated to add almost $2 trillion to the debt over the next decade.

“The pay-go thing is an absurd idea now given the times and given what’s already been done to curry favor with corporate America,” Grijalva said.
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Talk about counting your chickens. Shut up Dems.
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/opinion/sunday/affluent-suburbs-democrats.html
Turning Affluent Suburbs Blue Isn’t Worth the Cost

By Lily Geismer and Matthew D. Lassiter

Democratic politicians and strategists identify a “suburban revolt” against President Trump and right-wing Republican extremism as the key to victory in the 2018 and 2020 elections. They point to Democratic successes in the off-year 2017 elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and the surprise triumph of Senator Doug Jones in Alabama, as evidence for the party’s plan to target college-educated white women, upper-middle-class moderates and even disillusioned conservatives in the affluent suburbs.
In primary contests last week from California to New Jersey, Democrats pursued that “electability” strategy through the “Red to Blue” project of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which targeted suburban swing voters by clearing candidate fields for moderate and conservative Democrats like Gil Cisneros in Orange County and Jeff Van Drew in New Jersey.
The nomination of centrist candidates may bring Democratic gains in the affluent suburbs in the midterms. But the electoral success of that strategy has previously been modest — and more important, the party has paid insufficient attention to the substantial policy costs of turning moderate and affluent suburbs blue. Democrats cannot cater to white swing voters in affluent suburbs and also promote policies that fundamentally challenge income inequality, exclusionary zoning, housing segregation, school inequality, police brutality and mass incarceration.
The political culture of upscale suburbs revolves around resource hoarding of children’s educational advantages, pervasive opposition to economic integration and affordable housing, and the consistent defense of homeowner privileges and taxpayer rights. Indeed, unlike traditional blue-collar Democrats, white-collar professionals across the ideological spectrum — for example, in the high-tech enclaves of California and Northern Virginia, which combined contain eight of the 15 most highly educated congressional districts in the nation — generally endorse tough-on-crime policies, express little interest in protections for unions and sympathize with the economic agenda of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

The party’s suburban strategy emerged during the 1970s to counter Mr. Nixon’s racially charged appeals to “forgotten Americans.” Politicians like Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts campaigned on an agenda of protecting suburban quality of life, getting tough on crime, cutting middle-class taxes and promoting high-tech corporations. These “Atari Democrats,” along with the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton, played a key role in shifting the party’s center of gravity from industrial unions and working-class voters to high-tech corporations and postindustrial suburban professionals.
The suburban vote has been closely divided since the 1990s. Barack Obama held his final campaign rally in 2008 in an exurb of Northern Virginia and carried a majority of suburban ballots nationwide.
Yet a majority of white suburbanites live in middle-income places such as Macomb County outside Detroit. An electoral strategy that prioritizes high-tech areas and inner-ring suburbs faces daunting demographic math when applied nationwide. It has left liberalism in a historically weak political position.
Modern liberalism offers less and less to the blue-collar suburbs of Detroit, small towns in Pennsylvania and other working-class and once-unionized areas that have experienced the downside of the postindustrial economy and shocked the political system by voting for Mr. Trump. In 2016, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, endorsed the party’s suburban priorities with the optimistic forecast that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia.” (Mrs. Clinton was the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose Pennsylvania since Mr. Dukakis in 1988.)
Democrats haven’t paid enough attention to the substantial policy costs of turning affluent suburbs blue. That focus has failed to reverse the downward mobility of middle-income households and openly favored upscale communities without addressing economic and racial inequality.
The Democratic fixation on upscale white suburbs also distorts policies and diverts resources that could generate higher turnout among nonwhite voting blocs that are crucial to the party’s fortunes and too often taken for granted. It should not be that hard for liberalism to challenge the Republican tax scheme to redistribute income upward, and build on Mr. Obama’s important but inadequate health care reform, with policy solutions that address the real diversity of American suburbia.
That strategy would embrace a broad economic platform promoted by progressives like Elizabeth Warren and Stacey Abrams in her race for governor in Georgia.
Democratic strategists seem unable to understand why Mr. Trump carried the upper Midwest or why Hillary Clinton’s suburban strategy generated such unenthusiastic turnout among nonwhite voters. A political agenda fixated on turning affluent suburbs blue is capable of building neither a stable long-term majority nor a policy blueprint worthy of the progressive mantle.


Ms. Geismer is the author of “Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party.” Mr. Lassiter is the author of “The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.”
 
That’s overly simplistic. White suburban women in Gen X largely don’t like Hillary, at least not nearly as much as boomer women. They hate Trump. They’re already galvanized. It would be a missed opportunity not to court them. And given how districts are drawn, there’s no effective pathway to win the House without suburbs.
 
The IDC was a group of state senators in NY that were elected as Democrats but caucused with Republicans. The group was dissolved this year, but almost all members have primary challengers in 2018. Last week the state supreme court ruled that an election account that the group used to raise money is illegal:

Campaign account created by now dissolved breakaway Senate Democratic conference ruled illegal

It’s unclear exactly what the ruling means moving forward. Sen. Jeffrey Klein, who headed the now dissolved IDC, had previously said that when he and his six renegade colleagues returned to the mainline Dems in April that he would continue to use the special campaign account to help fight off primary challenges each are facing.

But it could significantly impact Sen. Marisol Alcantara (D-Manhattan), who if the ruling stands, might have to return about $500,000 she received from the account when she first ran for the seat in 2016, insiders say.
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Candidates challenging the IDC members:

No IDC NY Challengers
 
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