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.
What about emphasizing how our military presence in Iraq has hurt us at home and in the long run? Commercials with those generals from the convention. Barry McCafferty.
Remind people that when Katrina hit, the Louisiana National Buard was in Iraq [get the numbers].
It is hard for me to see how Democratic office-seekers I support are supposed to signal “responsible change” by capitulating to and collaborating with the very authors of catastrophe in the other and our own party. That is especially true when it comes to what people know to be and actually experience as zero-sum matters, not as “win-win” pabulum from policy peddlers or “hold harmless” protectionism from a plainly ineffectual Congress.
Those zero-sum matters include a defense budget, which is mostly pork and obsolescence.
They certainly include the constant compounding of losses piled up by improvident lenders with a huge lobby and keys to the Treasury. CRIME PAYS VERY WELL INDEED!
They surely include Congressional perks, which are doled out in Congress on the basis of (a) rain-making, (b) seniority, and (c) interest-group connections in that order, with nothing but obloquy for either original or actually courageous members.
So, if everybody and everything in Washington is going to be “win-win” or, at least, “hold harmless”, how do Democratic leaders, actual or would-be, signal any “responsible change” at all?
What are the “tells” we, as petit jurors that our lawyer-legislators pander to, can look for?
Most voters do not live in the juvenile fantasy world of military costumes and chicken-hawk posturing of the Thatcherites, Darbyites, and Trotskyites in the White House. But, they do not have any respect either for the hand-wringing pity party that “supports the troops” with the self-serving military budget “priorities” and endless tribute for foreign creditors and blackmailers our foreign lenders and borrowers alike hire as lobbyists.
We have universal video-game playing now, not universal military training or even a well regulated militia. Still, most voters do live in a savage world of economic zero- and negative-sum games or, in some cases, a childish world of whining for comfort food and recognition. In any case, few of us walk away fabulously wealthy from “public-private partnerships” we just looted or act as the lawyer, lobbyist, or apologist for.
We out here have no Congressional benefits, pensions, and entourages. So, we wonder about and resent cowardly politicians whose only concept of risk is truth-telling, sexual exploit, or failure to comply with the rules of legal graft.
I really like GQR’s work. It’s refreshingly fact-based, dispassionate and insightful. Excellent recommendations for policy and communication. My only comment on this particular report is that whatever national security posture the Democrats take, it must be authentic, organic and fit into a overall Democratic “brand.” As good as these recommendations are, they can’t just be talking points. (I love the irony of a recommendation based on a poll that reveals Democrats are disliked for using polls…).
To me it’s simple; David Plouffe should focus his campaign strategy around these talking points.
-John McCain still has the cold war mentality. We need a leader who is open to new approaches and innovative strategies….Strategies that will make our Country safer, better our relationships with foreign allies and ultimately, restore our reputation throughout the World. BARACK OBAMA IS THAT LEADER.
-The modern World needs a unifier and not a divider and war monger like McCain. Obama will sit down with friends and enemies while McCain will take the Bush-Cheney approach; have “talks” with no one, alienate your allies and conduct foreign policy in a reckless and arrogant way. The mess we are now experiencing is a result of the Bush-Cheney policies that McCain WANTS TO CONTINUE.
-Finally and MOST IMPORTANTLY; Obama was a Freshman Senator who had the courage to stand up to the President, Republicans and even many of his own colleagues and OPPOSE the War in Iraq. In 2002, Obama said we should focus ALL OF OUR EFFORTS on capturing Bin Laden and finishing the war with al-qaida. This type of foresight
should signify to all his readiness to be our President.