A Twitter thread from my Senator, Chris Murphy, CT:
There's one night I will remember most when thinking about Nancy Pelosi - the night I watched her single handedly save health care for 20 million Americans.
It was at the first Democratic caucus meeting after Scott Brown won the special Senate election in Massachusetts.
Many rank-and-file Democrats were in a panic, and they lined up at the microphone to tell Pelosi that it was time for us to give up on the Affordable Care Act. Or chop it up into little pieces - as some in the White House were suggesting.
I remember it like it was yesterday…
2 months later, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act. And today, it's so popular the new Republican Congress won't dare touch it.
I had never seen any person do what Pelosi did that night. I've never seen it since.
There hasn't been, and will not be, anyone like her.
Maybe it’s the Affordable Care Act passing because of her, or maybe it’s the honor of being first female Speaker, and/or maybe it’s because she’s so damn good at what she does.
Whatever the reason, she’s not easy to replace. She made running a razor-thin majority look easy. But the next Speaker won’t have it easy at all.
Nicholas Grossman/Arc Digital:
5 Ways the Midterms Were a Win for Democracy
The threat isn't over, but it's better than it could've been
After Trump’s coup attempt failed, Republicans could have shunned it, but instead the party chose to rally around defending—or at least excusing—it, and worked to remove barriers that thwarted it. Most concerningly, a hardcore subset of deniers aimed to get state posts overseeing elections. They won GOP primaries for governor in swing states Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona. Eight nominees for secretary of state, the top election administration position, formed the “America First Secretary of State Coalition,” openly promising to overrule voters if they don’t pick Donald Trump in 2024, and justifying it with lies about fraud. One, Arizona Republican nominee Marc Finchem, participated in Jan. 6 and says he’s part of the Oath Keepers, a militia that has seen multiple members convicted of seditious conspiracy for planning and executing the violent assault on Congress.
Every one running in a swing state lost. The only America First Secretary of State candidate to win was Diego Morales in Indiana, a solidly Republican state. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—a Republican who earned MAGA ire by resisting Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” after Biden won the state by 11,779—got reelected by almost 10 points, having defeated an election denier in the Republican primary. Gubernatorial nominees Doug Mastriano (Pennsylvania) and Tudor Dixon (Michigan) got crushed, and supposedly rising star Kari Lake (Arizona) lost a close race against an opponent who refused to debate.
David Rothkopf/Daily beast:
GOP Authoritarianism Isn’t Going Away After the Midterms
Yes, many prominent election deniers lost their races, but a disquieting number of them won at both the national and local levels. And the GOP supermajority on the Supreme Court isn’t going anywhere—which means more fundamental rights are threatened, and partisans will have friends in high places should they want to distort election results in the future.
Thomas E Patterson/Journalist’s Resource:
How the news media – long in thrall to Trump – can cover his new run for president responsibly
"If they are to serve the public interest, journalists cannot apply the ordinary rules for covering candidates," writes media scholar Thomas Patterson. "They are reporting on a politician who regularly defies democratic norms and lies with abandon."
Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:
If Trump Runs Again, Do Not Cover Him the Same Way: A Journalist’s Manifesto
I believed in traditional reporting, but Trump changed me — and it should change the rest of the media too.
I was called the c-word repeatedly. One reader suggested I have my breasts cut off. I tried to let all this nastiness roll off my back and even found it amusing when a Post reader sent me an email calling me a “venomous serpent.” John Schwartz, then a reporter for the New York Times who had become a friend, suggested I treat it as a badge of honor and write a book titled “Memories of a Venomous Serpent.”
Now, six years later, we journalists know a lot more about covering Trump and his supporters. We’ve come a long way, but certainly made plenty of mistakes. Too many times, we acted as his stenographers or megaphones. Too often, we failed to refer to his many falsehoods as lies. It took too long to stop believing that, whenever he calmed down for a moment, he was becoming “presidential.” And it took too long to moderate our instinct to give equal weight to both sides, even when one side was using misinformation for political gain.
Charlie Sykes/Bulwark:
Will This Time Be Different?
Trump’s third campaign.
Yes, Trump beat the DOJ and his GOP rivals to the punch, and remains the presumptive Republican nominee in 2024. He knows he faces kvetching in the ranks, but he’s seen this before, and Trump is confident that he can reprise the takeover of 2015-16.
But the vibe isn’t the quite the same, is it?
Gary Abernathy (staunch conservative and previous Trump defender)/WaPo:
Trump proves that even his base can’t trust him now
Trump voters are understandably confused. Trump is not wrong when he boasts of helping to create DeSantis and Youngkin. They are molded largely in his image. He should be proud of them, not disparaging. They’re his progenies, the natural heirs to the movement he started. His base loves them, considers them their own and thinks Trump should love them, too. After all, he birthed them.
Trump has never been averse to criticizing his fellow Republicans. He deployed an unforgettable mix of insult humor and shock comedy — as well as an unerring sense of what Republicans wanted to hear from their leaders but weren’t — to take down a series of GOP governors and senators in 2015 and 2016.
But attacking DeSantis and Youngkin is different than taking on Jeb Bush. It’s as though Trump suddenly started mocking Don Jr. or Ivanka. If Trump will turn on his proteges, his followers are realizing, he’ll turn on any of his acolytes. Even his base can’t trust him now.
George Conway/WaPo:
Trump is out for vengeance — and to protect himself from prosecution
Donald Trump craves the power. Even more, he craves the attention. And more than ever — after an unprecedented two impeachments, a humiliating reelection defeat that he can’t even admit, and amid multiple criminal investigations and civil suits — he seeks vengeance. The l’état c’est moi president who apparently tried to sic the IRS on his enemies (and perhaps succeeded), and who tried to extort Ukraine into smearing Joe Biden, can’t wait to get back on the job.
Trump won’t succeed, as his successive losses of the House, Senate, presidency and last week’s midterm results show. Too many Americans would crawl on broken glass to vote against him, no matter who his general election opponent may be. They have seen enough.