Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[y66]

From Chris Hayes, Editor at Large at The Nation:

 

I follow the census case closely and am married to (the world's best) SCOTUS analyst and former clerk and yet as a non-lawyer, I have a *really* hard time keeping all the procedural wrinkles clear, bc it's such a weird case. This is a really useful read.

 

The Census Case Is Shaping Up to Be the Biggest Travesty Since Bush v. Gore by Richard L. Hasen at Slate.

[barmar]

Well, there are quite a few of us who went to work and went to college. Earlier I noted that of various suggested D priorities I favored "free college" but I also noted that I wasn't so sure that is should be completely free. I want a good college education to be within the reach of someone who regards it as worth doing, worth putting some effort into it. I started at the University of Minnesota in 1956, the tuition was $72 a quarter, maybe $73. I could get jobs paying from about $1,25 to, when lucky, $2.00 an hour. I also got a scholarship, it of course helped a lot. But the U of M was heavily subsidized by Minnesota tax payers and I am very appreciative. I want something like that to be available to young people today. I am willing to discuss details, but the general idea is that I vary much favor having it be that a person with modest economic background can manage a good education. I think that a strong argument can be made that this will benefit the country but the truth is that I appreciate what I was given and I wish it to be passed on to others. That's the argument in a nutshell.

I think it's hard to relate your experience to modern times. Figure that a college student will get a that pays around minimum wage, so something on the order of $10/hr -- less than 10x what you were paid. And it will probably be a part-time job if they're going to school full time. On the other hand, college tuition, even at state schools, has increased at least 100-fold.

 

This is why most people graduate with mountains of debt -- the math just doesn't work out to do what you did. And if we think there's value to society in people being able to get a college education if they want it, not just if they can afford it, we need a solution to this.

[barmar]

Regarding the census issue, I wonder how opponents of the citizenship question might be able to prove that the documents expaining that it will benefit Republicans is actually the reason for adding the question. The administration could argue that it's just a lucky (to the GOP) benefit that's independent of whatever legitimate reason they claim for the question -- icing on the cake.

 

It seems like it's not good enough just to discover documents describing this effect, they need something like emails among the principles where they admit that it's their actual goal. Otherwise it's just circumstantial.

[hrothgar]

Regarding the census issue, I wonder how opponents of the citizenship question might be able to prove that the documents expaining that it will benefit Republicans is actually the reason for adding the question. The administration could argue that it's just a lucky (to the GOP) benefit that's independent of whatever legitimate reason they claim for the question -- icing on the cake.

 

It seems like it's not good enough just to discover documents describing this effect, they need something like emails among the principles where they admit that it's their actual goal. Otherwise it's just circumstantial.

 

My understanding is that there are direct sections of test that the REpublican consultant wrote that made their way into the administrations final work product.

[y66]

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

 

House Democrats have finally landed a witness worth tuning in for about the Mueller report: Robert Mueller himself. He’ll appear on July 17.

 

This isn’t ideal, by any means. The best people to haul in front of hearing-room cameras would be the actual fact witnesses, who President Donald Trump has largely prevented from appearing. That’s what provided the gripping theater back in 1973, when the Senate Watergate Committee heard from both cooperating and stonewalling witnesses.

 

But Mueller is better than nothing. For one thing, the hearings are certain to draw serious media attention, which at least gives Democrats a high-profile way to illustrate the report’s main findings – which are far more damning than Trump’s “no collusion, no obstruction” mantra suggests. Because of the way information now spreads, the testimony could have a greater impact than the publication of the report itself. Even just reading the main conclusions out loud will help whatever audience tunes in or sees news reports about it have a better sense of the full weight of the findings.

 

And as Greg Sargent points out, Mueller – who investigated Russia’s interference in the 2016 election – may be able to clarify some of the many remaining questions about what his probe turned up. Even if there are no bombshell revelations during the hearing, the House could wind up with new leads to follow in its own investigations.

 

Unfortunately, Democrats have already botched their negotiations with Mueller. He’ll only testify for one day, split between sessions of the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee. That’s not very much time, especially since we can anticipate that few Republicans will be asking substantive questions. (Expect them to mainly offer speeches about various insipid conspiracy theories. Some may not ask any questions at all, since they don’t want to hear truth-based answers.)

 

What the Democrats should do is eliminate the standard practice of giving each committee member five minutes for questions. Instead, they should designate a small number of questioners to pursue different topics, then lengthen the blocks of time allotted to each party (perhaps to half-hour stretches). That would give each questioner time to develop their points, instead of rushing through a random series of questions. It would also discourage lawmakers from trying to produce attention-grabbing sound bites to get themselves onto the news; instead, the questioners would have an incentive to use their time wisely, knowing they’ll already get plenty of publicity and can enhance their reputations by digging for real insights.

 

Whether they can break new ground or not, Democrats have an important story to tell about the Mueller report. They’re going to have a chance to tell it. Perhaps this time they can learn from their previous mistakes.

Will Dems learn from their previous mistakes? LOL

[y66]

Matt Yglesias has a useful suggestion for improving the debates:

 

Future debates should be structured as roundtable podcasts, complete with ad reads for ZipRecruiter and various doomed meal-in-a-box startups, for example:

“It’s going to be basically impossible to find anyone to hire in the smoking hot Warren economic boom, so you’re going to need ZipRecruiter’s sophisticated algorithms to help you find the most qualified candidates."

[y66]

From Supreme Court Leaves Citizenship Question on Census in Doubt by Adam Liptak at NYT:

 

In a setback for the Trump administration, the Supreme Court on Thursday sent back to a lower court a case on whether the census should contain a citizenship question, leaving in doubt whether the question would be on the 2020 census.

 

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said the explanation offered by the Trump administration for adding the question — asking whether a person is a citizen — was inadequate. But he left open the possibility that it could provide an adequate answer.

 

“The reasoned explanation requirement of administrative law, after all, is meant to ensure that agencies offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public,” the chief justice wrote. “Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise. If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.”

 

The practical impact of the decision was not immediately clear. While the question is barred for now, it is at least possible that the administration will be able to offer adequate justifications for it. But time is short, as the census forms must be printed shortly. The decision was fractured, but the key passage in the chief justice’s majority opinion was joined only by the court’s four-member liberal wing.

Link to full text of SC opinions: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/18-966_bq7c.pdf

[Winstonm]

Matt Yglesias has a useful suggestion for improving the debates:

 

The best way to improve the debates is to eliminate Chuck Todd.

[y66]

From the NYT Editorial Board:

 

In a win for good government, the Supreme Court on Thursday refused to give its full imprimatur to the Trump administration’s irresponsible decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census form.

 

The nuanced ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts noted that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s decision to add the citizenship question “was reasonable and reasonably explained,” despite the Census Bureau’s misgivings about the move. As recently as last week, bureau experts warned that adding the question would result in a significant undercount of households with at least one noncitizen member. Mr. Ross “determined that reinstating a citizenship question was worth the risk of a potentially lower response rate,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, because of “the long history of the citizenship question on the census.” Mr. Ross had argued that the question was needed to help the Justice Department better enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

 

Later in the ruling, however, the chief justice wrote that the voting rights rationale offered by Mr. Ross depended on an “incongruent” explanation that wasn’t supported by proper evidence. “It is rare to review a record as extensive as the one before us when evaluating informal agency action — and it should be,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “But having done so for the sufficient reasons we have explained, we cannot ignore the disconnect between the decision made and the explanation given.”

 

He added, “Altogether, the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the Secretary gave for his decision.” That’s the Supreme Court’s way of saying Mr. Ross was making it up on the fly.

 

Mr. Ross’s push for a citizenship question was unmoored from principles of administrative law — leading a federal judge in New York to call out the commerce secretary for violating “a veritable smorgasbord” of rules mandated by the Administrative Procedure Act.

 

“Reasoned decisionmaking under the Administrative Procedure Act calls for an explanation for agency action,” Chief Justice Roberts explained on Thursday, partly reversing that judge’s decision on other grounds. “What was provided here was more of a distraction.”

 

In reaching this limited conclusion, which sends the case back to the Commerce Department, the justices at least temporarily safeguarded the integrity of the decennial census — a constitutional requirement that calls for an “actual enumeration” of everyone in the United States. From that mandate flows the composition of the House of Representatives for the next 10 years and critical federal funding for localities — key aspects of America’s character that shouldn’t depend on citizenship.

 

The Supreme Court has made it clear that Mr. Ross now needs to come up with more than a concocted rationale. In response, he could adopt the president’s line that the census would be “meaningless” without a citizenship question. That would be disastrous — but with a printing deadline looming for the census forms, he may not have time.

 

The Supreme Court’s compromise decision is a partial vindication of the work by lower courts, many of which are doing the hard work of preventing overreach by the Trump administration. In a comprehensive ruling issued in January, Federal District Judge Jesse Furman ruled that Mr. Ross’s stated reason for the citizenship question was “pretextual” — that is, there was no truth to the rationale that the secretary needed the question to better enforce the Voting Rights Act. Judge Furman didn’t say what Mr. Ross’s actual rationale was; a judge in Maryland called it “a mystery.”

 

The absence of a citizenship question would be a relief to states and local governments with large immigrant populations, like New York and Texas. Many people in those communities have an understandable fear of returning a census form and then facing dire consequences.

 

Thursday’s ruling, perhaps sensibly, sidestepped questions about discrimination and equal protection of the law. In May, some of the New York plaintiffs alerted the justices that newly discovered evidence laid bare Mr. Ross’s real motive for a citizenship question: to benefit Republicans and non-Hispanic whites. None of this was proved during a trial in Manhattan last year — partly because the Trump administration fought tooth and nail to prevent a deposition of Mr. Ross, an effort the Supreme Court agreed with last October.

 

The justices deserve credit for sending the case back for more thoughtful decision-making. After oral arguments in April, many court watchers expected that they would repeat the mistake of the court’s travel ban ruling and ignore the Trump administration’s evident bad faith. Fortunately, they were wiser this time around.

+1 to the SC

[shyams]

From the NYT Editorial Board:

 

+1 to the SC

The vote was split 5-4, am I correct? So it's more like +1 to Chief Justice Roberts.

[y66]

The vote was split 5-4, am I correct? So it's more like +1 to Chief Justice Roberts.

The vote was indeed 5-4 on the key part of the decision so +0.2 to Roberts, RGB, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan.

 

ROBERTS, delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court with respect to Parts I and II, and the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts III, IV–B, and IV–C, in which THOMAS, ALITO, GORSUCH and KAVANAUGH joined; with respect to Part IV–A, in which THOMAS, GINSBURG, BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN and KAVANAUGH joined; and with respect to Part V, in which GINSBURG, BREYER, SOTOMAYOR and KAGAN joined.

 

THOMAS filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which GORSUCH and KAVANAUGH joined.

 

BREYER filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which GINSBURG, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN joined.

 

ALITO filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part.

[Winstonm]

The vote was indeed 5-4 on the key part of the decision so +0.2 to Roberts, RGB, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan.

By giving their token approval to gerrymandering, the SCOTUS has given permission to eliminate democracy in the US. This is totally on the head of Mitch McConnell, who is still fighting the Civil War.

[kenberg]

I think it's hard to relate your experience to modern times. Figure that a college student will get a that pays around minimum wage, so something on the order of $10/hr -- less than 10x what you were paid. And it will probably be a part-time job if they're going to school full time. On the other hand, college tuition, even at state schools, has increased at least 100-fold.

 

This is why most people graduate with mountains of debt -- the math just doesn't work out to do what you did. And if we think there's value to society in people being able to get a college education if they want it, not just if they can afford it, we need a solution to this.

 

Largely, I agree. I was in fact somewhat regretting posting, simply because things are so different. But my point, at its base, is not exactly what we should do but rather what we should aim for.

 

I recognize problems with free tuition. Indeed there is no free lunch. And I think the student loan program has, in many ways, been a disaster. What I want is for a kid who grows up like I did and who is interested, I mean interested, in going to college to be able to do so. I am grateful and I wish others to have the same. I think a strong case can be made that it strengthens the nation as well. I am more than willing to consider various approaches, to look at the good and the bad, but my ultimate goal is pretty clear in my mind.

[Chas_P]

Cannot control himself and continues to embarrass himself.

 

Fare thee well pilgrim.

[johnu]

 

Doesn't care if his lack of dignity and any shred of honor is on full display by continuing to post here.

[Zelandakh]

The vote was split 5-4, am I correct? So it's more like +1 to Chief Justice Roberts.

You guys are naive sometimes. They have until October for the printing and this strikes me as an operation by Roberts to give the SCOTUS cover for having properly vetted the question when it finally gets let through in ~3 months' time. +1 for political imaging and -9999 to democracy and the rule of law.

[hrothgar]

You guys are naive sometimes. They have until October for the printing and this strikes me as an operation by Roberts to give the SCOTUS cover for having properly vetted the question when it finally gets let through in ~3 months' time. +1 for political imaging and -9999 to democracy and the rule of law.

 

There needs to be enough time for both printing and judicial review.

Given that the last time this raised its ugly little head, it went all the way to the Supreme Court...

[y66]

From A quiet Joe Biden debate moment that deserved more attention by Matthew Yglesias at Vox:

 

Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate featured a number of high-profile, attention-grabbing clashes between former Vice President Joe Biden and his various challengers. But there was also a quieter clash, initiated by Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, that fell a little flat as television drama but deserves attention.

 

Biden touted his record cutting deals with Republicans, a central theme of his campaign, and pointed to a specific example of his success. On the morning of New Year’s Eve 2012, Biden helped the administration reach a deal with Republicans on a confusing package of taxes and spending. Bennet countered Biden’s recollection, arguing the outcome was simply a bad deal that Biden ended up foisting on his Democratic colleagues.

 

In narrow horse race terms, this is probably not a huge vulnerability for Biden. For starters, even though it happened relatively recently, the drama is a little obscure because most people were not paying attention to politics on New Year’s Eve 2012. It also involves some tedious budget technicalities. And last but not least, Biden was clearly operating as a member of the Obama White House on this, and his big political vulnerabilities come on topics where he’s differed from Obama.

 

Nonetheless, it’s critically important as a substantive issue. It’s one thing to charge Biden with having an unrealistic theory of change — after all, everyone in the field is promising to deliver more than they really can. But the charge leveled by Bennet is different. His argument isn’t about whether Biden is promising deals he won’t be able to cut but that Biden will cut deals that shouldn’t be made. It’s a serious charge and worth reviewing the details.

 

The issue at hand was an event dubbed by the political press at the time as the “fiscal cliff.”

 

This cliff was the combination of three separate things. One was that the Bush tax cuts, originally scheduled to expire in 2010, had been extended by two years during a lame duck congressional session and were now set to expire at the end of 2012. The other was that unemployment insurance benefits, which had been repeatedly extended in response to the Great Recession, were once again scheduled to expire. A third was that a temporary payroll tax cut, enacted to help fight the recession, was scheduled to expire.

 

It was generally understood that this hefty dose of austerity budgeting was set to hurt the economy.

 

But there was also a longer-term political fight underway about the Bush tax cuts. When these were enacted way back in 2001, they were scheduled to automatically expire as a kind of gimmick to allow them to qualify for the budget reconciliation process. From the beginning, however, Republicans intended to extend them permanently.

 

The Democratic position, for years, had been that they would partially extend the Bush tax cuts while refusing to extend that portion of the tax cuts that applied only to families earning more than $250,000 a year. Under the Democratic plan, to be clear, even families earning more than $250,000 would get tax cuts extended. It’s just that the portion of the tax cuts that applied only to high-income families would not be extended.

 

Republicans, however, repeatedly refused to pass bills that would do this partial tax cut extension. Their plan was to force a hard choice on Democrats — either the rich got their tax cut or else middle-class taxes would rise. It was a bold, daring squeeze play on the part of the GOP. And in the insecure mood of winter 2010 after landslide GOP midterm victories, Democrats got scared, backed down, and agreed to a two-year extension.

 

But Christmas season of 2012 had a different mood. Obama had just been reelected. Democrats picked up two Senate seats. Democrats won a majority of the House vote, and though gerrymandering prevented them from securing a majority of House seats, they did pick up eight. The GOP squeeze play had, fundamentally, failed on Election Day.

 

And liberals felt it was time to press the advantage and let all the tax cuts expire. Once the new baseline was in place, in their view, they could introduce new legislation that cut middle-class taxes and dare the GOP to oppose it. But instead, at the last minute, Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell cut a deal.

 

The way Biden described this deal was very simple: “I got Mitch McConnell to raise taxes $600 billion.”

 

That would be quite the achievement, but it’s not what happened. What Biden got, instead, was an agreement for McConnell to support a partial extension of the Bush tax cuts except for tax cuts that would apply only to families that earned more than $450,000 a year.

 

This did, it’s true, raise $600 billion in revenue relative to a baseline in which the tax cuts were fully extended. Except there was no universe in which that was going to happen. Republicans had just lost the election. The deal obviously lost a ton of revenue relative to a scenario in which the tax cuts simply expired. And it lost considerable revenue relative to scenario in which Democrats got their way and set the cut point at $250,000.

 

In exchange, McConnell also agreed to a one-year extension of unemployment insurance benefits.

 

The deal came together very suddenly during a holiday period when most people weren’t paying attention to politics and much of the press was gone on vacation. I happened to be working at the time, however, and when news of the deal broke, I remember it as being one of the oddest stories of my career.

 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid publicly supported the deal but was privately furious about it, and described the White House as having thrown his caucus under the bus for no reason. In a recent article, the Intercept’s Ryan Grim recounts Reid’s current recollection of the story with Biden cast specifically as the villain.

 

My recollection of what Reid was saying at the time pointed fingers more generally at the White House, but it’s basically consistent. The strange thing is that at the time, my sources in the White House were pointing their finger at Senate Democrats — who they said were panicking and on the verge of caving until the White House was able to cobble something together at the last minute.

 

I couldn’t figure out what had actually happened, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody ever really has. Regardless, America ended up with a deal that both Reid and Obama publicly supported even while their staffs were complaining bitterly about it.

 

Yet Thursday night, it was a point of pride for Biden.

 

Bennet, who was one of only two Senate Democrats to actually vote no on the deal, recalled it differently.

 

“The deal with Mitch McConnell was a complete victory for the Tea Party,” he said. “We had been running against this for 10 years. We lost that economic argument because that deal extended almost all those Bush tax cuts permanently and put in place the mindless cuts we still are dealing with today that are called the sequester. That was a great deal for Mitch McConnell and a terrible deal for America.”

 

To the best of my understanding at the time, much of the White House staff and the Senate leadership agreed with Bennet that the deal was bad. But some mix of nervous elements among red-state senators and in the White House decided to strike it, and once it was struck, few senators felt like being party poopers and voting no.

 

But not only was the deal kind of bad on the merits, it left Democrats tactically tied up throughout Obama’s second term. Democrats would find themselves proposing to do this or that and wanting to pay for it with higher taxes on the wealthy. Republicans wouldn’t go for that, and then little got done.

 

Had they gone over the cliff, the strategic situation would have been reversed. Tax revenue would have ended up being higher than even Democrats wanted it to be. And instead of fighting with Republicans about how to pay for new spending, they could have struck deals with the GOP to pair tax cuts with new spending initiatives and created some sense of momentum and progress.

 

Biden, however, portrays himself not as having extricated Democrats from a jam induced by craven red-state senators but just says he got McConnell to agree to raise taxes, which, fundamentally, didn’t happen.

 

This all lacks the emotional punch of a school busing or Iraq War dispute.

 

But it speaks to a very real concern progressives have with Joe Biden, which is that his talk of bipartisanship and getting things done isn’t just unrealistic — it’s actively pernicious.

 

What if, in a desire to show he’s getting things done and healing the country post-Trump, Joe Biden agrees to advance a lot of bad bills? The same day as the debate, for example, a clutch of 17 moderate House Democrats sent a letter to bank regulators urging a laxer approach to derivatives regulation. And this kind of thing happens all the time, where some kind of corporate interest legislation manages to attract the support of a dozen or two House Democrats who have ties to the interest at stake.

 

The Obama White House mostly — though not universally — pushed back against this stuff. But if they’d decided not to, they would have “gotten more done.” There would have been less fighting and more dealmaking in Washington. And they probably could have even gotten a progressive priority or two through in the mix.

 

The Obama administration could, in short, have seen the fiscal cliff deal as a model rather than as a weird one-off. And that’s potentially how Biden sees it and how he plans to govern — a much more important point of contrast with his more progressive rivals than speculating about the differences in hypothetical health care plans.

[kenberg]

From A quiet Joe Biden debate moment that deserved more attention by Matthew Yglesias at Vox:

 

I am on the road, or more precisely at an airbnb in Berkeley, and while that needn't have stopped me from watching, I didn't. I think the focus of this article is important. Biden is hardly alone in describing what he has done in highly simplified and misleading terms, but we need people to bring this to our attention. I expect that I would like Joe Biden personally, just as I expect I would like Bernie Sanders personally and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez personally, but that's hardly the issue. Looking at details such as this, and listening to other views about the details, is important.

[barmar]

Wasn't the Obama era full of "deals" like that? He was dealing with an obstructionist Congress, and it seemed like getting anything passed was considered a win. Obamacare ended up being a far cry from what we really wanted, it had to be gutted to get it passed.

 

And of course Biden is going to spin it in the best possible terms, that's just politics. You don't say "Well, we cut the damage by $600 billion", you say "We got them to give us $600 billion in concessions".

[kenberg]

Wasn't the Obama era full of "deals" like that? He was dealing with an obstructionist Congress, and it seemed like getting anything passed was considered a win. Obamacare ended up being a far cry from what we really wanted, it had to be gutted to get it passed.

 

And of course Biden is going to spin it in the best possible terms, that's just politics. You don't say "Well, we cut the damage by $600 billion", you say "We got them to give us $600 billion in concessions".

 

indeed this was at a time when the R motto was "To Hell with the economy, to Hell with the country, to Hell with everything other than destroying the Obama presidency". So yes, we do have to take that into account.

 

 

 

[Winstonm]

Wasn't the Obama era full of "deals" like that? He was dealing with an obstructionist Congress, and it seemed like getting anything passed was considered a win. Obamacare ended up being a far cry from what we really wanted, it had to be gutted to get it passed.

 

And of course Biden is going to spin it in the best possible terms, that's just politics. You don't say "Well, we cut the damage by $600 billion", you say "We got them to give us $600 billion in concessions".

 

Obama had a majority for the first 2 years of his presidency, which is how the ACA was passed. The 2008 midterms - truly the entire Obama presidency other than the first two years - was a disaster for the Democratic party. When Obama took office, there were 60 Democratic senators. That fell to 46. The number of House seats held by Democrats shrunk from 257 to 188. The party lost state elections galore, as well.

[y66]

From 'A betrayal': Inside the bitter rift between Pelosi and Schumer over border bill by Mike DeBonis and Rachael Bade at WaPo:

 

“The Senate has a good bill; our bill is much better,” Pelosi told her members at a Tuesday caucus meeting. Said Hoyer to reporters the same day: “We think it’s not as good as our bill but not a bad bill.”

 

On Wednesday, Schumer, Pelosi and Lowey met before attending a joint news conference on election security, shortly after Pelosi ended a phone call with Trump, who pushed her to accept the Senate bill. The three agreed on a strategy of sending the bill back to the Senate in hopes of forcing a quick negotiation, according to an aide familiar with the exchange.

 

In the meeting, Schumer rattled off the list of wins his colleague secured in the Senate bill. Pelosi and Lowey agreed the bill was good, according to a Senate aide familiar with the exchange. But Schumer also said the House bill was preferable, a House aide added, so Pelosi and her team still expected Schumer would play hardball to win more concessions.

 

Those mixed messages, and the bipartisan Senate committee vote, sent the message to Republicans that they had little reason to negotiate further. McConnell had another card to play as well: The presidential debates Wednesday and Thursday took seven Democratic senators away from Washington. When time came to vote on the House version of the border bill, Democrats could muster only 38 votes — short of what they would need to block passage of the Senate bill.

 

When it came time to vote on the Senate version, only six Democrats withheld their votes. The rest were absent or voted for it — including Schumer.

 

Pelosi and those in her leadership circle were shocked. To them, Schumer had given McConnell a nuclear weapon — the ability to brag that his legislation had overwhelming bipartisan support and should therefore pass the House.

 

The next day, Pelosi walked into the two-hour-long leadership meeting saying Schumer couldn’t keep his members in line. One senior Democratic aide called it “a betrayal”; another lawmaker called it “a broken deal.”

 

But to those in Schumer’s orbit, the Wednesday bipartisan Senate vote should not have come as a surprise. In their view, the House had gone AWOL on border negotiations for weeks and should have known the depth of Democratic support for the bill following the 30-to-1 committee vote.

 

In addition, according to Senate officials familiar with the talks, neither Pelosi or any other House Democrat at any point explicitly asked Senate Democrats to block the Senate version of the bill. The real leverage point, they believed, would come after the House sent back an amended Senate bill on Thursday — forcing a negotiation with Republicans.

 

Instead, Democratic centrists in the House who were fortified by the overwhelming Senate vote blocked that strategy, touching off an intense round of finger-pointing.

 

During one private meeting this week, some top Democrats mocked Schumer for speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday alongside a horrifying photo of a drowned migrant father and daughter while appearing at the same to be undermining the House’s efforts to make the bill better for children.

 

Others whispered that Senate Democrats were “smelling the jet fumes” of the July 4 holiday recess — or simply didn’t want to complicate the schedules of their colleagues running for president who needed to attend the debate in Miami on Wednesday and Thursday.

 

In a statement Friday, Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said that “the Speaker’s focus has always been on Mitch McConnell. He shortchanged the children when he said ‘get lost’ to the House.”

 

“Senate and House Democrats are united in realizing Mitch McConnell is standing in the way of doing so much good for America, including doing even more for the children at the border,” said Schumer spokesman Justin Goodman.

McConnell makes these guys look like amateurs.

[rmnka447]

Obama had a majority for the first 2 years of his presidency, which is how the ACA was passed. The 2008 midterms - truly the entire Obama presidency other than the first two years - was a disaster for the Democratic party. When Obama took office, there were 60 Democratic senators. That fell to 46. The number of House seats held by Democrats shrunk from 257 to 188. The party lost state elections galore, as well.

 

We all recall how ACA was passed and it was ugly -- back room deals, sweetheart arrangements, etc. -- to keep the required Senate 60 votes. And, of course, the iconic comment by Speaker Pelosi on the ACA "Pass it, so we can find out what's in it." It was a kluge from the start pushed through without any bipartisanship. It was not a shining moment for our democracy.

 

The demise of Dem majorities was the result of the electorate recognizing how opposed they were to what the Dems/Obama administration was pushing. Simple answer, throw the bums out. And, they did.

[Winstonm]

 

 

Simple answer, throw the bums out. And, they did.

 

No, that was 2018 midterms.