I have no idea if anyone will be checking this blog tonight, but as of 9:30 p.m. EDT, the results from Connecticut and Georgia are showing that you don’t know nuthin’ if you don’t know where the votes are coming from.Ned Lamont has a narrow lead over Joe Lieberman in CT with a little over half the precincts reporting, but who knows exactly what that means? The CW in the Nutmeg State is that the urban precincts come in much later than the ‘burbs, which might mean Lieberman’s surge is yet to come. But I’m only guessing here.I have a much better idea about where the votes come from in GA, and I have to tell you, the early reports showing that Hank Johnson is demolishing Cynthia McKinney in Georgia-4 are very premature. Yes, he’s winning 3-1 with 18% of the precincts reporting, but every one of those precincts are low-vote, majority-white, Republican leaning precincts in Gwinnett and Rockdale Counties. Until boxes finally start coming in from Dekalb C0unty, where probably 95% of the votes in this runoff will be cast, there’s no way to know what’s really happening in this race.For those who care, the early returns from Georgia indicate that Jim Martin will almost certainly beat Greg Hecht for the Democratic nomination to run against Casey Cagle (the guy who beat Ralph Reed in a Republican primary) for Lieutenant Governor. Hecht’s whole campaign was based on trying to generate an anti-Atlanta vote against Atlantan Martin; but early returns show Martin winning in Savannah, Macon, Columbus, and a number of other south and central Georgia counties. And he’s winning easily in the north Atlanta suburbs as well.More later, if events justify it.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 14: Democrats Really Were in Disarray Over Spending Bill
Having spent much of the week watching the runup to a crucial Senate vote on appropriations, I had to express at New York some serious misgivings about Chuck Schumer’s strategy and what it did to his party’s messaging:
For the record, I’m usually disinclined to promote the hoary “Democrats in Disarray” narrative whereby the Democratic Party is to blame for whatever nightmarish actions Republicans generally, or Donald Trump specifically, choose to pursue. That’s particularly true right now when Democrats have so little actual power and Republicans have so little interest in following laws and the Constitution, much less precedents for fair play and bipartisanship. So it really makes no sense to accuse the powerless minority party of “allowing” the assault on the federal government and the separation of powers being undertaken by the president, his OMB director Russ Vought, and his tech-bro sidekick Elon Musk. If congressional Republicans had even a shred of integrity or courage, Senate Democrats would not have been placed in the position this week of deciding whether it’s better to let the government shut down than to let it be gutted by Trump, Vought, and Musk.
Having said all that, Senate Democrats did have a strategic choice to make this week, and based on Chuck Schumer’s op-ed in the New York Times explaining his decision to get out of the way and let the House-passed spending bill come to the floor, he made it some time ago. Nothing in his series of rationalizations was new. If, indeed, “a shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda,” while enabling the administration to exert even more unbridled power over federal programs and personnel, that was true a week ago or a month ago as well. So Schumer’s big mistake was leading Senate Democrats right up to the brink of a collision with the administration and the GOP, and then surrendering after drawing enormous attention to his party’s fecklessness.
This doesn’t just look bad and feel bad for Democrats demanding that their leaders do something to stop the Trump locomotive: It also gives the supreme bully in the White House incentive to keep bullying them, as Josh Marshall points out in his postmortem on the debacle:
“[P]eople who get hit and abused and take it tend to get hit and abused again and again. That’s all the more true with Donald Trump, a man who can only see the world through the prism of the dominating and the dominated. It is a great folly to imagine that such an abject acquiescence won’t drive him to up the ante.”
The reality is that this spending measure was the only leverage point congressional Democrats had this year (unless Republicans are stupid enough not to wrap the debt-limit increase the government must soon have in a budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered). Everyone has known that since the new administration and the new Congress took office in January. If a government shutdown was intolerable, then Democrats should have taken it off the table long before the House voted on a CR. Punchbowl News got it right:
“Let’s be blunt here: Democrats picked a fight they couldn’t win and caved without getting anything in return. …
“Here’s the lesson from this episode: When you have no cards, fold them early.”
Instead, Democrats have taken a defeat and turned it into a debacle. House and Senate Democrats are divided from each other, and a majority of Senate Democrats are all but shaking their fists at their own leader, who did in fact lead them down a blind alley. While perhaps the federal courts will rein in the reign of terror presently underway in Washington (or perhaps they won’t), congressional Democrats must now become resigned to laying the groundwork for a midterm election that seems a long time away and hoping something is left of the edifice of a beneficent federal government built by their predecessors from the New Deal to the Great Society to Obamacare. There’s a good chance a decisive majority of the general public will eventually recoil from the misrule of the Trump administration and its supine allies in Congress and across the country. But at this point, elected Democrats are going to have to prove they should be trusted to lead the opposition.