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.
Here’s how I see the refusal of both Clintons to acknowledge the fact that she is defeated: neither saw Obama coming; and neither can accept defeat graciously, especially in light of their initial anticipation at the beginning of the primary campaign that Ms. Clinton simply would walk away with the nomination.
The Clintons have run a deeply flawed campaign and, much like Bush ceaselessly changing the goal posts in determining success in Iraq, they have tried to change the parameters of this campaign. Now, for instance, we are told solemnly by the Clinton campaign that the votes needed to win the nomination are significantly more than the number set by the DNC, when Michigan and Florida fell into primary date apostasy and lost their delegates as a result. Who are THEY to declare this? The Clintons will now dictate the rules of the DNC?
They have run an awful campaign. For starters, theirs has been a top-down and old-fashioned campaign (surprising for the long computer-literate Bill Clinton), relying on large donors and assuming unquestioning allegiance from various minority blocs – traditionally Democratic – who have gone over to Obama. When it appeared that Obama was taking the momentum, they resorted to racist-tinged comments and ads. And finally, the refusal of Clinton to deal with the facts on the ground instead of wishes in the air, has only added fuel to the fire of speculation that both she and her husband will stop at nothing to secure this nomination.
I had supported Bill Clinton during and after his Presidency; a New Yorker, I voted twice for Clinton for senator. I was a Clinton partisan when this primary campaign began. But, after Bill Clinton’s South Carolina remarks and the “3:00 AM” ad, as well as the continuing negative screeds from her camp, I have had done with the both of them.
This is a “change” election, much like 1932, 1960, and 1980. The Clintons are a day late and a dollar short, and they just don’t get it. Moreover, if the Clintons’ campaign is an indication of how the White House would be run, then I fear we would get another George Bush, only in a different candy wrapper.