Oy vey. We’re being led to believe that moderate Democrats are so, so angry at their Senate leadership. In their telling, Democrats screwed up the entire gambit.
“Shutting down the government over any issue never works, and we put so much pressure on DACA being the reason that it lost the message narrative. This was our best way out,” another senior Senate Democratic aide told TPM. “The outside groups have to own this.”
Actually, it was working. The public was blaming Republicans by a whopping 2-1 margin. Republicans were in open revolt with each other. And yet Democrats committed a mind-boggling nonsensical unforced error and bailed out a hapless GOP. In what world did Democrats lose the message narrative? Now, while this aide was too much of a coward to put his or her name in writing, Claire McCaskill was not.
Ignore the nonsense about “rebuilding the middle.” The American mainstream is with the Democratic mainstream. But whatever, the second tweet is more relevant. The problem isn’t getting something through the Senate: it is using the tools available to enact change that will get through the House—and get the popular vote loser to sign it. Senate passage alone is worthless.
Elections have consequences, giving presidents the right to nominate Supreme Court justices, and requiring the Senate to offer an up-or-down vote. Yet Neil Gorsuch sits on the Supreme Court.
Or put more explicitly: Republicans use every tool in their arsenal to accomplish their goals. It may be dirty, but it works, and they get shit done! Democrats capitulate, time and fucking time again.
Nothing requires them to vote “yes” on a funding bill. It is the majority’s job to get the votes it needs. And if that majority really doesn’t like the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, they can change it (as has happened several times—see Gorsuch, Neil). But in no way is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, asshole extraordinaire, entitled to Democratic votes. If he wants them, he has to do the same thing he does with his own caucus—negotiate for them. Or he can change the rules.
Democrats may have lost the last election, and yes, elections have consequences, but there are rules in place to protect the minority—rules that Republicans have had no problem exploiting. USE THEM.
Bullshit. Leadership could’ve literally done nothing, watching Republicans get blamed for the shutdown while that moron in the White House drooled in front of his TV.
Ha ha ha, okay. “If they chose to.”
How miserable have Flake and Sen. Susan Collins made McConnell after he ignored promises he made to them? The whole notion is laughably stupid. And again, the goal here isn’t for a DACA fix to pass the Senate. It’s for a DACA fix to be signed into law.
It really takes an especially inept party to look at the energy of the Women’s March over the weekend, look at the polling showing Republicans losing the public relations war, take a gander at an AWOL White House, and then decide that the timing was right for capitulation.
As someone, somewhere said: Republicans fear their base. Democrats fear the Republican base. No one fears the Democratic base. That has to change.
I thought Alabama might remind Democrats about the importance of base turnout. McCaskill and her fellow red-state Dems can’t win without their base! It’s amazing that they still can’t see that.
Now we get to do this all over again in three weeks. Don’t get your hopes up.
