Time For A Democratic Majority In The House...

[Crackpot]

Amazingly astute bit of self analysis there.

[Big RR]

If Trump's success showed us one thing, it showed that there are many in the US who are hurting and resentful about being ignored and left behind by the so-called "recovery". Those " mind-deadening and high-injury jobs" were jobs people used to support their families, and when they went away, there weren't any jobs to replace them. And so we have a disenfranchised class who everyone ignored until Trump came along and said "it's someone else's fault." Now offshoring may be a good economic idea from a corporate perspective (and for the time being I'll leave off factoring in how many more Hondurans or other third world workers will be injured in factories that are no required to even meet our safety standards), but it is hardly a win for those dispossessed with no other marketable skills, no way to get those skills, and no way to travel to where the jobs are. So, sure, they vote in the guy that says "I'm on your side", mainly because everyone else is just ignoring and/or dismissing them.

Maybe some of those additional profits realized from moving the jobs offshore should be devoted to providing some sort of training and employment options for those dispossessed, but no one even tries that. And so the anger grows... if we don't have enough of a heart to care about these people, the specter of a lot more Trumps in the future jar us into further action. But instead they just get platitudes like the "rising tide floats all boats" that you posted.

[Crackpot]

Thanks for saving me the time. It’s probably a completely futile endeavor, but, it saves me the effort.

[Econoline]

Maybe some of those additional profits realized from moving the jobs offshore should be devoted to providing some sort of training and employment options for those dispossessed, but no one even tries that.

Ummm....wasn't that part of Hillary Clinton's platform and campaign in 2016?







(Yeah...I know, I know....)

[Econoline]

Back to Jim's OP: Here's an interesting interview with Adam Schiff (ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee) on Slate.com.

A short excerpt:

• ...they’re employing a burn-down-the-Congress strategy to protect the presidency. It’s a strategy that says, “We don’t care what happens to the country. We just care about maintaining our majority and protecting the president of our party.” The most appalling realization to me of the last year and a half—it’s not been what kind of president Donald Trump turned out to be; it’s how many people in Congress have been complicit with him. That has been a bitter realization.

(Click here to see the whole piece.)

I find that phrase "the president of our party" particularly telling: that's exactly the way all too many Republicans seem to be thinking of this. (I'd like to echo others' already-stated kudos to Jim for NOT being one of them.)

[Big RR]

Econo--if I recall, it was part of Obama's platform as well, but it never proceeded beyond a token program, what with having to cut taxes and all. The only way it can work is if it becomes a priority in the way that we make our foreign policy military ventures a priority.

[BoSoxGal]

[ex-khobar Andy]

I have just watched Trump's rejection of the Iran deal. This is the man who told us that healthcare was complicated. The man is a fucking idiot. And I don't mean that in a nice way. I think that Kim Jong Un is watching. Why should he agree to any sort of arrangement with a country that does not negotiate in good faith?

[Econoline]

From David Gerrold (on Facebook):

• So ... no, the Trumpanzees are never going to recognize they got conned and betrayed. They are never going to admit that this man is corrupt, incompetent, mendacious, and dangerous. They are cheering him because they have invested themselves in him.
  
  Here's the insight.
  
  In Germany, when Hitler began his rise to power, some Germans recognized he was dangerous, but other Germans — scared, anxious, desperate — invested themselves in the authoritarian utopia he promised. Krystallnacht? Evidence that the Nazis were serious about the Jews. Reichstag fire? More evidence that the problem was serious and a strong man was needed. Night of Long Knives? Necessary to get rid of traitors within. No matter what horrors the Nazis perpetrated, the believers found a way to justify it in their minds.
  
  So yeah, we might see the occasional article about how the soybean growers are taking a hit, how Boeing is taking a hit, how the farmers can't get their crops picked, how domestic steel suppliers are taking a hit, how all the various Trump voting blocs are taking a hit —
  
  But what we're not seeing is a precipitous fall in his poll numbers. What we're not seeing is a red resistance. Because, no matter what he does, whatever it is he's doing — they're going to find a way to forgive him and blame the other guy. Because he's their Hitler.
  
  It is imperative that the Democrats win back the House of Representatives in November and open up investigations into everything and everyone in the White House — not necessarily with impeachment in mind, but to unravel this tangled fabric of lies, corruption, greed, and kleptocracy and keep unraveling it until it is rolled out for all to see — a testimony to a national tragedy.
  
  Whatever happens — we will not be able to return to the United States as we knew it. We will have to reinvent the United States. And if we don't do it, THEY will.
  
  So the single most important mission for the next six months is to register voters, energize them, and get them to the polls.

[Lord Jim]

Vote against the GOP this November

by George F. Will Opinion writer June 22 at 4:41 PM

Amid the carnage of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy along the southern border, the most telegenic recent example of misrule, clarified something. Occurring less than 140 days before elections that can reshape Congress, the policy has given independents and temperate Republicans — these are probably expanding and contracting cohorts, respectively — fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which they should vote.

The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers. They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them.

Consider the melancholy example of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), who wagered his dignity on the patently false proposition that it is possible to have sustained transactions with today’s president, this Vesuvius of mendacities, without being degraded.

In Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons,” Thomas More, having angered Henry VIII, is on trial for his life. When Richard Rich, whom More had once mentored, commits perjury against More in exchange for the office of attorney general for Wales, More says: “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . But for Wales!”

Ryan traded his political soul for . . . a tax cut. He who formerly spoke truths about the accelerating crisis of the entitlement system lost everything in the service of a president pledged to preserve the unsustainable status quo.

Ryan and many other Republicans have become the president’s poodles, not because James Madison’s system has failed but because today’s abject careerists have failed to be worthy of it. As explained in Federalist 51: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”

Congressional Republicans (congressional Democrats are equally supine toward Democratic presidents) have no higher ambition than to placate this president. By leaving dormant the powers inherent in their institution, they vitiate the Constitution’s vital principle: the separation of powers.

Recently Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is retiring , became an exception that illuminates the depressing rule. He proposed a measure by which Congress could retrieve a small portion of the policymaking power that it has, over many decades and under both parties, improvidently delegated to presidents. Congress has done this out of sloth and timidity — to duck hard work and risky choices.

Corker’s measure would have required Congress to vote to approve any trade restrictions imposed in the name of “national security.” All Senate Republicans worthy of the conservative label that all Senate Republicans flaunt would privately admit that this is conducive to sound governance and true to the Constitution’s structure. But the Senate would not vote on it — would not allow it to become just the second amendment voted on this year .

This is because the amendment would have peeved the easily peeved president. The Republican-controlled Congress, which waited for Trump to undo by unilateral decree the border folly they could have prevented by actually legislating, is an advertisement for the unimportance of Republican control.

The Trump whisperer regarding immigration is Stephen Miller, 32, whose ascent to eminence began when he became the Savonarola of Santa Monica High School .

Corey Lewandowski, a Trump campaign official who fell from the king’s grace but is crawling back (he works for Vice President Pence’s political action committee), recently responded on Fox News to the story of a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome taken from her parents at the border. Lewandowski replied: “Wah, wah.” Meaningless noise is this administration’s appropriate libretto because, just as a magnet attracts iron filings, Trump attracts, and is attracted to, louts.

In today’s GOP, which is the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him. A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House. And to those who say, “But the judges, the judges!” the answer is: Article III institutions are not more important than those of Articles I and II combined.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... fa1bad070a

I'll bet if you had told ol' George just a very few years ago that he would be writing that column, he would have told you that you were as crazy as I would have said you were if you had told me that I would vote for Hillary Clinton for President...

[Guinevere]

A hand clap for George Will, indeed. It is strange times. One can only hope that the so-called president ultimately suffers the same fate as Savonarola.

Jim, should the Democrats fail to retake the House In November, I believe it will be time for you and the other principled Republicans of the world to form a new party. Should the Democrats take the House and continue kowtowing to Wall Street, it will be time for principled Democrats to do the same. Maybe there will be some room for we disaffected from both sides of the aisle to meet in the middle.

[BoSoxGal]

I didn't think I like ever be more bereft than I was the morning after the 2016 election, but if this November doesn’t see George’s wish come true, I believe it will be all the more utterly devastating - it’s one thing to accept that millions of my fellow citizens fell to the lure of Trump, but if by a majority they affirm the actions of the GOP over the last two years I will find that incomprehensible.

[Lord Jim]

The worst implication of a Democratic failure to retake at least the House in the midterms will be the fact that we will have two more years of no legislative check on a President with a rapacious appetite for flaunting the rule of law, subverting the justice system, and undermining our democratic institutions...

A President who will be further emboldened in his authoritarian endeavors by the failure of the electorate to provide this check...

During the Obama Administration, there was a faction of people who were absolutely convinced that he wanted to set up a dictatorship...

There was another faction of people on the other side who thought the same thing of George W. Bush...

If nothing else positive comes of this horrendous period in American history, perhaps at least these people can now see what an honest-to-God, sure-as-shootin' President who really does want to establish a dictatorship looks and sounds like...

Though I suspect that a lot of the same folks who thought Obama or Bush wanted to become dictators are probably big supporters of the President who really wants to become one...

[Jarlaxle]

I will be voting anti-incumbent in all races, as usual. (No Senate races on the ballot this year.)

[Lord Jim]

I watched this discussion that Brooke Baldwin had with Ana Novarro and Tara Setmayer (another anti-Trump Republican strategist) earlier today...

I found that a lot of the painful, conflicted angst they expressed really hit home with how I also feel...

(If you follow the link at the end and scroll down to the end of the article, you can watch the whole discussion; it's not available on YouTube yet)

Republican strategists and commentators Ana Navarro and Tara Setmayer both agreed that they don’t fault people like Max Boot and Steve Schmidt for abandoning the Republican Party. However, Navarro said that there is nothing the GOP would love more than to see people like her jump ship.

Citing Boot’s op-ed, Navarro explained that Republicans have a responsibility to provide a check and balance on the executive branch of government, unless “Robert Mueller pulls off a hail Mary.” But under this Congress, she doesn’t see it happening any time soon.

“It cannot be this Congress, because they have shown complete and abject failures of checking and being a balance to the obstruction, to the abuse, to the verbal divisiveness,” Navarro said. “They have been completely negligent. So, when you’re voting against the Republican Party, you’re voting against this despicably lame excuse for a party because they can’t stand up for principles, because they can’t stand up to a guy who wasn’t republican a few years ago.”

Setmayer said that as the Bernie Sanders-wing begins to take hold, she doesn’t exactly see her own values align with the Democratic Party. But Republicans bailing might be what the GOP needs to find its soul again.

“But part of me looks at what’s happened to the Republican Party and looks at the Trump takeover, which I believe is a perversion of what the Republican Party used to stand for,” she began. “And and I say, ‘Perhaps the only thing that can right the ship is if Democrats take over and Republicans pay a price for this behavior.’ Because they have become hypocrites and this is not good for the political health of this country when you have two parties that are dysfunctional.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/07/ana-na ... and-trump/

[wesw]

ana Navarro probably educated you on how to properly bunch your panties

[wesw]

I saw that interview as well.....

it s not your party anymore, jim.

[Scooter]

If it's not the party of people like Jim anymore, then I am sure you agree that the leadership should be honest and say so, so that people like Jim know not to vote for it come this November, or ever again, for that matter.

The resultant perpetual Democratic presidency and congressional majorities would not seem to be the result you were hoping for, however.

[wesw]

fine the DEms can have all of the insider elitists and the repubs can have all of the blue collar workers.

sounds fair to me.

done and done.

[Scooter]

Yeah, I'm sure all of the blue collar workers, whose real wages have declined over the past 18 months, whose jobs are disappearing because of a nonsensical tariff war, and who were kicked in the teeth by a union busting ruling by the conservative wing of the SCOTUS, will all be flocking to vote Republican.

If you really believe that, I have a beautiful art deco bridge to sell you in San Francisco.