Okay, let’s game this out. We’re one week into the shutdown. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, Democrats are able to stand wholly united in opposition to a funding bill without DACA. Negotiation is currently stalled or completely dormant.
Republicans start rolling the ads, “Democrats say they believe government is important in your life, but they’re putting the needs of immigrants above your needs. Tells you how important they think government really is, doesn’t it?” or some variation thereof.
What’s the response to this? It’s factually true, it would in fact be putting about a million DACA recipients’ needs above the needs of 300 million American citizens. You can explain why the long-term needs of the former stand to suffer vastly more damage than the short-term needs of the latter, but when you’re explaining, especially explaining in a nuanced way why the few benefit at the expense of the many, you are losing.
Well, now it’s two weeks. When do we blink? Are we damn sure the GOP would blink first in a fight to keep the lights off in DC??
Honest and true, I do not understand, I fundamentally do not understand how anybody sees a Democratic victory stemming from such a process. And shouting “well, then fight harder” is just fucking irrational. Tea parties of the left in every meaningful sense.
To borrow a well used line from the Delta boys…“we fucked up, we trusted them…”
You would think the D’s would know they lost manuerability , that whatever they got in the budget deal was it…we have,regrettably lived with the vileness of the current iteration of the GOP…one group needs a heart and the other needs a brain…both are desperate for courage.
I can cite reporting that tells us that more people are running for Democratic office than are Rs. Women are coming out of the woodwork to run for the first time, and small towns are behind the movement to run candidates opposed to trump. I believe there will be less couchsitters because of this. We’re in line to win the House, but not the Senate which is an uphill task by any measurement. Let Cotton say what he must and also let the Rs bludgeon us, but I’m not to overreact to an article clearly designed to scare the shit out of us. People inclined to vote Democratic as a way to minimize PPs’s impact on the country will still do so, so we’re talking largely about perception.
I’m more concerned about the warning from the intelligence community who are predicting Russian is planning on interfering this year as they did in 2016, and there’s almost no way to stop them.
And for all those who didn’t vote last November or voted for third-party nutcases…
Btw, did I tell you the story about my Uber driver in CA, former military, btw, who didn’t vote for Hillary and instead, voted for Gary Johnson, while telling me that Johnson didn’t even know what or where Aleppo was? And he was disgusted, but he still voted for him.
This guy had other stories, which led me to believe that he would not be comfortble with a woman in the White House.
I’m old enough to remember way back to two weeks ago when numerous commenters were confidently declaring that the Dems hadn’t given up any leverage at all when they ended their brief weekend pseudo-shutdown, because they got this great promise from McConnell, and although sadly no promise from Ryan, surely McConnell would keep his promise and a bipartisan DACA plan would soon pass the Senate, thereby putting enormous pressure on the House and Trump.
And these same commenters assured me that if there was no sign of movement from McConnell and Ryan, Senate Dems would use their second bite at the apple (at the end of the first CR) to shut down the government again.
Precisely none of that happened.
So said commenters will have to forgive me for not taking any of their current arguments very seriously.
Maybe the initial shutdown was a contest we never had a chance to persist in, given the Joe Manchins and Claire McCaskills and Tim Kaines in our ranks. But pretending we somehow did win was an enormous self-delusion. A self-delusion that is now in tatters.
I’m old enough to remember that when Trump was declared the winner in 2016, I kept saying how fucked we were after my husband told me we lost the Senate.
Once again, many of us default to “Dems weak,” “Why didn’t Schumer xxx” and the rest of the circular firing squad. Just who in their right mind thinks that even if the Senate does come up with an acceptable solution it won’t be torpedoed in the House?? Let’s try living in the real world for a change instead of playing the “woulda coulda shoulda” game. Facts: Trump created this crisis by executive order (which I recall was “unconstitutional” when Obama did it); being in the minority, the Democrats have very little power to push their desired legislation through Congress; if the Dems did continue the shutdown, they most certainly would be held accountable for the ensuing chaos. Let’s not help the Rethugs play their game. Call them out, oppose them when we can, and stop criticizing our side.
Some (probably self-identified) far-left commentators: “Damn it, WHY do so many people vote for Republicans against their own self interests!? It’s maddening, wake the fuck up!”
Many of the same commentators, probably: “Rapidly-bluing heavily-federal NoVA and College Park and so on will definitely still vote for Democrats if Democrats force constituents onto a potential eight month unpaid vacation, right?”
In other words, in politics you have no leverage when you aren’t willing to stand your ground. This is not exactly news. But if Senate Dems were never willing to stand their ground, they shouldn’t have bothered with the faux-shutdown in the first place. All they did was make their weakness and lack of unity more obvious than ever.
If the argument is that the Dems successfully used DACA recipients as bargaining chips in a bid to end sequestration, well…uh, okay. Just don’t be surprised when Hispanic turnout remains limp in 2018 and 2020.
In an age of cyber and nuclear war, not to mention gun-toting men walking through our neighborhoods with a chip on their shoulder or the whispers of Jesus in their ears, a wall is the stupidest and most wasteful tactic conceivable.
If the argument is that the DEMS successfully used DACA recipients as bargaining chips in a bid to end sequestration, well…uh, okay. Just don’t be surprised when Hispanic turnout remains limp in 2018 and 2020.
Triage fucking sucks. It means some of your patients are dying. Not gonna argue that one.
I agree that the vital signs are in the grassroots, where the momentum is just fine. We won a Trump district in Minnesota just this week, so fuck the polls. Approval ratings are worth little in special elections and midterm elections, when it’s all about partisan motivation. The kind of people who disapprove of Trump one week and approve of him the next are hardly the kind to step out on a blustery day in November to vote for a guy they’re not sure about. Dems meanwhile will crawl over broken glass to vote, to quote the great Ted Cruz. And in any case, February polling is almost totally irrelevant to November. Do the polls take into account Porter? I doubt it. Do they take into account the imminent assault on Medicare and Social Security? I doubt it. The Blue Wave will happen, even with our utterly useless Congressional wing shitting in its pants for the next seven months.
Edit: BREAKING: Democrat Margaret Good wins FL D72 by 8 points. Trump won it by 5 points. Grassroots delivers again.
