US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1174

Reports indicate that House Democrats are in turmoil over some moderates’ recent votes with Republicans on the House floor. The internal squabbles are more than an inside baseball battle; they indicate that the party still hasn’t figured out why they lost so badly in the 2010 midterm elections.

It may be hard to recall, but Democratic moods were giddy in early 2009. They held the presidency, a 60-seat, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a whopping 257 seats in the House. Collectively, Democrats held more power in Washington than they had since before President Ronald Reagan’s election nearly 30 years prior. National magazines featured pictures of President Barack Obama as the new Franklin D. Roosevelt, ready to usher in a new period of Democratic dominance.

It was all gone in just two years. The 2010 midterms gave Republicans their largest House seat gains and their biggest majority since 1948. Senate Republicans picked up six seats, and likely would have gained three more but for the nomination of fatally flawed tea party candidates in Nevada, Colorado and Delaware. Democrats have been clawing back from those losses ever since.

Any outside observer could see why this happened. On a host of issues — especially Obamacare, climate change and a massive economic stimulus package — the party got too far out in front of public opinion. The long-frustrated Democratic base wanted quick movement on all its priorities at once.

The mood was summed up by one exchange between Obama and his treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner. According to reports, Obama and Geithner were on a conference call shortly after the election, and Obama was talking about the expansive agenda he would pursue. Geithner objected, telling the president that his “legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression.” Obama responded, “That’s not enough for me.”

It would have been more than enough for the people who elected him.

Obama and the congressional leadership forgot that they won their majorities by persuading people who had voted for President George W. Bush just four years prior to entrust them with power. Those voters were willing to try a new course, but they had not signed on board for a different voyage.


Nevertheless, in vote after vote, leaders pushed, cajoled and compelled members representing Republican-leaning districts to back the party line. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was especially tough, pushing for House passage of an ambitious climate change bill with red-seat Democratic votes, even though Senate passage was highly unlikely.

The result was damning. Since 2010, Democrats have found it increasingly difficult to win in areas in which they once had dominated or at least been competitive. In 2009, Democrats held 98 House seats and 23 Senate seats in states Bush carried in 2004. Today, they hold only 74 House seats and a mere seven Senate seats in those same states.

The current Democratic House majority rests on holding seats that President Trump carried in 2016. Twenty-nine House Democrats hold districts that Trump won. Others hold seats that had long been Republican but swung to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Members in these seats recognize their voters are different and don’t want all of the progressive agenda forced down their throats.

Yet that is exactly what Pelosi and Democratic progressives such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) seem to want them to do. “We are either a team or we’re not,” the speaker reportedly told moderates who voted Thursday for Republican amendments to a bill expanding background checks for gun purchases. The 29-year-old member from the Bronx characteristically went further, threatening to put those moderates who sided with Republicans “on a list” for primary challenges.

Neither Pelosi nor Ocasio-Cortez seems to understand why they hold the majority at all. They did not win because a majority of Americans suddenly decided that Sweden is a global paradise. They won in part because many Democratic candidates promised to deliver “new leadership” on both sides of the aisle. Most of all, they won because moderate former Republicans want Trump checked and out of office.

The don’t want a Green New Deal that promises a federal-led “mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II.” They don’t want to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. They don’t want the mandatory government health-insurance system envisioned by the Medicare-for-all proposals. They don’t even want to impeach the president. They just dislike Trump.

Democrats who vote for Republican floor amendments do so because they aren’t getting what they want from the bills the Democratic leadership is putting forth. If the speaker wants them to get on the team, maybe, as the team manager, she needs to get them into the game.

In Rare News Conference, North Korea Offers Its Own Version Of Summit Collapse

... "What we proposed was not the removal of all sanctions but the partial removal," Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho said through an interpreter in Hanoi. He said North Korea sought relief from five U.N. sanctions imposed in 2016 and 2017 that hurt the country's economy, out of a total of 11, in exchange for disabling its main nuclear complex.

But earlier, Trump said at his own news conference from Hanoi that Kim, North Korea's leader, "wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn't do that." ...

On March 02 2019 23:15 farvacola wrote:
I'd guess that this NK summit debacle will discourage Trump from making further cavalier fp moves given how poorly its worked out for him, but who knows.

On March 02 2019 23:15 farvacola wrote:
I'd guess that this NK summit debacle will discourage Trump from making further cavalier fp moves given how poorly its worked out for him, but who knows.

On March 03 2019 00:03 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


I wonder if he thinks he came out of the summit looking bad, which is all that really matters to him. I guess his impression will be highly based on whether Fox News reports that he succeeded in flexing on KJU or failed to get anything done.

On March 02 2019 23:15 farvacola wrote:
I'd guess that this NK summit debacle will discourage Trump from making further cavalier fp moves given how poorly its worked out for him, but who knows.

On March 01 2019 19:52 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
North Korea just made a statement contradicting Trump's reason for not reaching an agreement at the recent summit meeting. Trump had originally said that he and Kim Jong Un couldn't make a deal in Vietnam because KJU wanted all sanctions removed, which was a compromise that Trump wasn't willing to make. On the other hand, NK diplomat Ri Yong Ho just insisted that KJU had asked for only half of the sanctions (specifically, the ones that are severely undermining NK's economy) to be lifted as a trade for NK disabling its main nuclear complex.

Who's more reliable: Trump or KJU? I honestly have no idea.


Excerpt taken from here: https://www.npr.org/2019/02/28/699006894/in-rare-news-conference-north-korea-offers-its-own-version-of-summit-collapse

According to a senior official who briefed the media on condition he not be named because he was not authorized to discuss the negotiations publicly, the North Koreans “basically asked for the lifting of all sanctions.”

But he acknowledged the North’s demand was only for Washington to back the lifting of United Nations Security Council sanctions imposed since March 2016 and didn’t include the other resolutions going back a decade more.

What Pyongyang was seeking, he said, was the lifting of sanctions that impede the civilian economy and the people’s livelihood — as Ri had claimed.

The U.N. Security Council has imposed nearly a dozen resolutions targeting North Korea, making it one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world. So Kim was indeed seeking a lot of relief — including the lifting of bans on everything from trade in metals, raw materials, luxury goods, seafood, coal exports, refined petroleum imports, raw petroleum imports.

But Kim wasn’t looking for the lifting of sanctions on armaments. Those were imposed earlier, from 2006, when the North conducted its first nuclear test.

For Pyongyang, that’s a key difference.

On March 03 2019 03:02 xDaunt wrote:

How did it work out poorly? Just because he didn’t get the treaty he wanted? Keep some perspective on where things are. Trump has gotten North Korean to suspend all nuclear and missile testing and given up comparatively little in return. All of the crippling sanctions are still in place. Trump is absolutely correct in insisting upon complete denuclearization before lifting any of the sanctions. Trump can easily wait North Korea out while the sanctions continue to do damage. In the meantime, tensions will remain eased on the Korean Peninsula and the door will remain open for continued negotiations at the mere cost of Trump saying a few nice things about Kim Jong Un. That’s a win in my book.

On March 03 2019 00:29 Ghostcom wrote:


At least one media outlet in Denmark compared him to Reagan, liking the meeting and the no-deal to the Reagan-Gorbachev no-deal. Whether it was a success or not will depend on what happens next I think.

On March 02 2019 16:10 Introvert wrote:
So this week, on the gun control bill the Democrats were pushing, Republicans used a procedural motion to call a vote on a last-second amendment. 26 Democrats voted with the Republicans to add an amendment to notify ICE when an illegal immigrant attempts to purchase a gun. If memory serves, this was formally proposed as an amendment a few days ago either in committee or on the floor. The Democrats, because they are totally not radical on immigration and ICE, voted it down. But the Republicans got this in the bill at the end with the help of those 26 purple districts Democrats. This procedural motion has twice now caught Democrats off guard. Throughout all of 2011 to 2019 when the GOP held the chamber, the majority always caught these and killed them. So today the Democrats fought about it. Pelosi in particular was not happy.

It reminded me yesterday that Pelosi is not really a mastermind, as some have painted her to be. Henry Olsen today in WP summerizes this very well:





The article doesn't really have a good stopping point, so I posted it all. But I think all of this Pelosi-love misses how the House works. It's a majoritarian institution. She's not a master operative (though she raises lots and LOTS of $$$$). She's a strongman (strongwoman?). Purely from a political point of view I am fascinated watching these moderates (as I think I've said before) try to avoid something that happened to them a short eight years ago. Will they eventually be cowed? If Trump wins reelection will that save their seats? Especially interesting is what Olsen says about Democrats thinking '08 was the beginning of a period of Democrat dominance. They still act this way. "The Emerging Democrat Majority" is still just around the corner. It's espeically interesting because it's watching one of the main problems with the progressive mindset play out in real time. They behave like history just started.

Now to be fair, if your goal was actually to slow push to the left, it kinda works because the Republican party is such a spineless institution (and honestly, has been for much of its history) these days that they never go for the goal and try to reverse things. Only to slow them down (Obamacare was not repealed or replaced, Planned Parenthood was never defunded). The reasons for that are for another time. But as the saying goes, "that's how you got Trump."

Sorry if this more boring than whatever was being argued about, but if you like observing the game of politics then focusing on these members is something you should be doing. Me, I think they'll be fine until Trump is gone at least. But my, are they skittish.

On March 03 2019 03:11 xDaunt wrote:

The leftist American media relentlessly pilloried Reagan’s diplomacy then, too. They were wrong then about him, and they are wrong now about Trump.

On March 03 2019 03:27 xDaunt wrote:

Obama didn’t manage the situation well at all. Like his predecessors, he kicked the can down the road without aggressively engaging North Korea, and, more importantly, China.

On March 03 2019 03:51 xDaunt wrote:

All of the above except for the WSJ.

On March 03 2019 03:11 xDaunt wrote:

The leftist American media relentlessly pilloried Reagan’s diplomacy then, too. They were wrong then about him, and they are wrong now about Trump.